Creation Moment 5/15/2019 - Photosynthesis: A Mystery for Evolution

For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible,..
Colossians 1:16

"The origin of photosynthesis has always been a profound problem

for evolution. A 2019 study by one of the leading researchers in this area, Tanai Cardona, from the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial College London, has confirmed the fact that after decades of research we are no closer today to answering the origin of photosynthesis than we were before. This is true after

an incessant stream of speculative ideas and debates on the evolution of photosynthesis that started in the first half of the twentieth century and shows no signs of abating. Some of these speculative ideas have become commonplace, are taken as fact, but find little support.

This is the same conclusion made over 70 years ago by a 1957 study of the evolution of photosynthesis. It concluded that we had, at that time, nothing more than some theories, all of which were very problematic and little more than speculative just-so-stories.

The origin of photosynthesis is so critical that Leslie called it “the last of the great inventions of microbial metabolism” that changed “the planetary environment forever.”
This “invention” by bacteria was so stunningly complex that the best and brightest scientists are still trying to understand its biochemical details. The problem for evolution is that life either uses the enormously complex photosynthesis system, or a very different system, to manufacture food and produce usable forms of energy. No viable transitional forms have been found, so imagination must take over.

Photosynthesis is the process by which plants use sunlight to manufacture carbohydrates from carbon dioxide and water.
The term photosynthesis means to synthesize using light energy. --Light consists of energetic photons.
--With enzymes in the plant cells, the energy in sunlight splits water molecules (photolysis),
--breaking water apart to produce

-oxygen,

-hydrogen,

-and electrons.

--The oxygen diffuses out of the plant as a waste product which animals in turn breathe in order to sustain animal life.
--The hydrogen, along with the electrons energized by light, converts a compound called NADP into NADPH by adding a hydrogen.
--That energized molecule is later used, through a series of molecular machines, to provide the energy to add inorganic phosphate to Adenosine Diphosphate (ADP) to produce Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP).

-This is the light-dependent reaction.

 

The ATP, NADPH and other chemicals are used in a chain of reactions called the Calvin Cycle to build a form of sugar called glucose.

Glucose consists of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen in the following common ratio: C₆H₁₂O₆.
All of this takes place in a stack of systems called grana inside of the thylakoids located in specially designed organelles called chloroplasts.
Located in plant leaf cells, chloroplasts contain chlorophyll, the molecule that gives plants their green color. Besides chlorophyll pigment, photosynthesis  requires close to 100 other proteins. Professor Cardona adds that, after 200 years researching the origin of photosynthesis problem, it is still

too soon to claim that we understand how photosynthesis originated, let alone to claim that we understand the photochemistry of the earliest reaction centers to ascertain that the origin of anoxygenic photosynthesis pre-dates the origin of oxygenic photosynthesis.

 The problem has always been, how did photosynthesis evolve? Since many kinds of algae and protists and bacteria rely on plants to produce food directly or indirectly, and plants themselves use it to build their own food, all life depends on photosynthesis. There are only few exceptions, like extremophiles at the ocean floor. All herbivores and most omnivores depend on photosynthesis. Even all carnivores ultimately depend on the herbivores that they consume, which eat plants. How photosynthesis could have evolved is acknowledged as a complete mystery.

In the following paper, written by an evolutionist, bold italics have been added to the terms that illustrate the speculative nature of all theories of photosynthesis evolution:

The earliest reductant for photosynthesis may have been H₂. The carbon isotope composition measured in graphite from the 3.8-Ga Isua Supercrustal Belt in Greenland is attributed to H₂-driven photosynthesis, rather than to oxygenic photosynthesis as there would have been no evolutionary pressure for oxygenic photosynthesis in the presence of H2. Anoxygenic photosynthesis may also be responsible for the filamentous mats found in the 3.4-Ga Buck Reef Chert in South Africa. Another early reductant was probably H₂S. Eventually the supply of H₂ in the atmosphere was likely to have been attenuated by the production of CH₄ by methanogens, and the supply of H₂S was likely to have been restricted to special environments near volcanos.

Photosynthesis requires oxygen to function. Thus, oxygen must exist on the earth before photosynthesis can function.

When oxygenic photosynthesis originated also remains controversial. Wide uncertainties exist for the earliest detection of biogenic oxygen in the geochemical record, or the origin of water oxidation in ancestral lineages of the phylum Cyanobacteria.”

The early Earth is believed by scientists to have had very little oxygen or even none at all. They know that oxygen would have been very detrimental to life’s building blocks at the origin of life. If we go back far enough to the evolutionists’ scenario of the Earth’s formation, when it was still cooling from the hot mass evolutionists imagine, how long did it take for microbes to “invent” this highly complex yet vital process?"
CEH