J. José Bonner At a very superficial level, students can learn
what we tell them when we say that plants capture light energy
and use it to make plant material. But it's not clear that this
really sinks in, or that it even makes sense. The fundamental
reason, of course, is that it's "just magic" if we don't know
how it works. Yet, the details of how it works are unbelievably
complicated. For most students--even after graduating from
college--photosynthesis remains little more than something they
memorized for Science Class. As with many of the fundamental
Learning Bottlenecks in biology, I suspect that a goodly
percentage of students' confusion results from being taught that
something happens, but without a context to show that such a
thing must happen to account for what we see. The bottleneck,
then, would seem to be that students don't really understand why
anyone would be so goofy as to imagine that something like
photosynthesis could possibly exist. Why not give the students
some of the basic information