Seed germination and light

This for everyone to read.   I am connected to a garden forum in which many
topics are discussed.    Below is a response from a Phd from Berkley
University.   She has some dynamite answers to questions.   I was asking
the questions of germination & light and seedlings and light.   I
experienced poor germination from pumpkin seeds when I put them under 24
hrs light, sterile soil, heating pad.   I had a 95% germination rate when I
wrapped seeds in paper towel, baggie, heating pad, and 8 HOURS darkness. 
Please read below.
Bill  Sadowski.......

>>>>Because that's how mother nature designed them? --seriously, and vastly
oversimplifying, sunlight is the time when the plants convert light energy
to sugars, and night is the time for cell division (hmmm. I'm not sure any
of my professors claimed that it was the darkness --but would a plant in a
closed room under 24 hour equal brightness know it was night?) and making
things out of the sugars. Like starches, vitamins, cell walls... (it's not
that none of these go on in daytime, but there's a proportion--)

Some seeds won't germinate at all in light --usually larger ones. They
figure they're not covered up enough to get their roots down before they
use up the food in the seed. Others won't germinate at all in total
darkness --they need a bit of red light (that's what's reliably left after
the sunlight gets through and bounces around on a very thin covering of
soil. These are the very small seeds like petunias and the plants which are
pioneers --ie the kinds of weeds that carpet bared soil of roadsides and
your garden-- and their garden descendants. Lettuce is one of the better
known light-germinators.

That successful garden plants should be derived from "weedy" groups makes
sense if you think about it. There would never be the kind of upheaval in
nature that gardeners cause once to several times a year unless there was
something rather catastrophic --a fire, a flood, a volcano, a drastic land
slip--. Lettuce, for instance, has fluffy tails on the seeds to catch the
wind --like the first colonizers that blow onto a mudslide-- <<<<<<<

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