I hate to be a party pooper because I adore this type of stuff, but I have never gotten paper-seeds to germinate. And I'm a farmer, so I kind of know what I'm doing. I suspect they're either using old seed or stuff that's really hard to germinate. Or as Rachy pointed out, it's stuff that's not regionally appropriate. If I put seeds out in April, there's a pretty strong chance most of whatever it is will rot. There's a good reason all that information is printed on the back of seed packets...you need it!

So they're cute, and I'm all for seeding people with the idea of growing things...but at the end of the day, I've found them more disappointing than practical.

Some seed retailers are warning commercial customers that the price of seeds is expected to rise by 30-40 percent next year. Not good news for seed-card producers. Or anyone who eats, really.

Brilliant. This project epitomizes the best qualities of the internet - making information available, accessible, fluid. Organic growth based on the needs and available resources of real people.

The whole thing is a little Oracle-like. Nice mythic resonance. Wonder if this would do well in a place like Chiapas, where the Zapatistas have done well with the internet, but literacy and financial resources are still abysmally low.

This also connects a different type of people to the internet, who don't have the privileged white boy frame of reference...diversity is always good for evolution.

This list is so 30-something white urban American biased it's hysterical. And a little scary. The funniest part is they seem to take themselves so seriously that they've "documented" the year each named skill became "obsolete"? Whipping cream is obsolete since 1967? Hahahahahahahahahahaha. This cannot be for real.

From the wilderness survival page:

"A sampling of wilderness survival skills include:

Knowledge of native flora and fauna"

Are these guys seriously saying botany is obsolete? On what planet? The one without any plants? Good lord, what a tiny world these uneducated pasty white boys live in.

Maybe if we cross enough plants and animals, humans will get enough plant genes to learn how to sit still and stop screwing things up, and plants will develop free will and start messing with us instead.

Can't you just see it? Plants will start breeding us as fertilizer in diabolical and misguided hopes of dominating the planet. Torture ensues!

Asteroids and other dramatic changes are part of evolution, but aren't evolution in and of themselves. Biological response to that change is evolution, and that response takes more time than lab biology has patience to observe.

When you remove biology from the field, and create change entirely in a lab, you are removing yourself from the feedback loop of evolution, seeing yourself as the master and commander of evolution, rather than a part of it.

This is a frighteningly arrogant basis from which to advance biological understanding:

From this stuff, to the wood itself, the materials here, even the air that we're breathing, has been engineered for temperature and humidity, so that it is easier for us to deal with.

Newsflash: it's not all about engineering things for *you* and your momentary desires.

Nature has been playing for millions of years, but that's the thing: MILLIONS of years. That kind of slow, patient evolution gives ecosystems time to respond and adapt to a change...time lets species reproduce over generations, lets landscapes change, allows ecosystems to renegotiate themselves.

Evolution from a lab doesn't give ecosystems time enough to respond and evolve, and humans never take the time to observe carefully what the real impact is. We just demand to research our next change, like petulant toddlers in a knife store. Hubris is the right word.