Two Billion Years of Information in the Palm of Your Hand: The Seed

What comes to mind when you think of information storage technology? Hard drives, flash drives, CD, DVD, Blu-Ray, floppies (if you’re old enough to remember actually using them)? No doubt something requiring a power source. A little low-tech contemplation and quickly paper, papyrus, palm leaf, and even stone stele emerge, all appropriate, good and lasting stores of knowledge. But what else?

If you acknowledge that information isn’t just a human construct (and I think you should, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this) then you have to also look for other stores of information than the anthropogenic.

Which is where a really interesting new piece in The Archdruid Report, the blog of John Michael Greer, Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America, comes in.

Greer says that seeds are a far more sophisticated information storage system than DVDs, and he’s got a good point:

The natural world contains and circulates a vast amount of information. We can read a very small fraction of it, but that doesnt mean we can do without it; most of what keeps human beings alive on this planet just now is a function of the information economy of nature.

There are any number of examples, but the one that comes to mind just at the moment is the wealth of information to be found in the seeds of any open-pollinated plant. Seeds can be understood in several different ways, but one of the most useful is to think of them as a medium for information storage. Like other media, they will reproduce the information they contain under some specific set of conditions; just as a DVD stores information in one form but will present it in another – for example, a movie – when you put it in a DVD player and press the start button, a seed stores information in the form of DNA, and will present it in another – a plant – when you put it in appropriate soil and add sun and water. What sets seeds apart from DVDs as a far more sophisticated information technology, of course, is that when you play a movie, the movie doesnt manufacture new DVDs for all your friends, much less shuffle the movie just a bit in every generation, in a way that tends to produce a better plot and snappier jokes as time goes on. Seeds, by contrast, do an exact equivalent of this.

In fact, Greer notes, when you roll a single seed in your hand you are holding two billion years of stored information. Think about that. Two billion years of stored information in the palm of your hand, that with the proper procedures of planting, watering and exposure to sunlight reveals itself.

The original goes on to comment on how corporate control of seed distribution, and production of seed that doesn’t reproduce prohibiting the millennia-old practice of seed saving, is a major threat to the world. To which I’d agree whole-heartedly.

But frankly, today, for whatever reason, it seems to me that the best way to stop that corporate control of seed isn’t to drone on about all the reasons it’s a bad thing—there’s a time and place for that, no doubt—but rather to ask you all to stop and contemplate how much information is contained in a single seed.

If more people did that, marveling at its wonder, the fight against corporatism in agriculture becomes easier.

Similar Posts:

• Make Your Own Seed Tape for Planting Annuals, Herbs, or Vegetables
• 4 Plants Saved from Extinction by the Endangered Species Act
• Finding a Suitable Storage Unit
• 5 DIY Crafts For Easter
• 15 Awesome Kitchen Island Design Inspiration

Posted in Home Design Tips