David Michael Seaborg

World Rainforest Fund · Evolution

Glenn Seaborg was born on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in 1912. At age 10, he moved to southern California, where his high school chemistry and physics teacher, Dwight Logan Read, sparked his interest in these fields. Seaborg was the first person to have an element named after him while he was still living. The only other person to have an element na...

The canonical genetic code is on a sub-optimal adaptive peak with respect to its ability to minimize errors, and is close to, but not quite, optimal. This is demonstrated by the near-total adjacency of synonymous codons, the similarity of adjacent codons, and comparisons of frequency of amino acid usage with number of codons in the code for each am...

This paper argues that organisms are integrated, holistic systems whose phenotypic traits and genes interact with each other and natural selection. More than this, organisms are feedback systems. I introduce the term integration of the organism to refer to this idea that organisms are such interacting systems. Integration of the organisms is a majo...

The argument of Futuyma and Risch (1983/1984), that the homosexual orientation is not a distinct, evolved, reifiable trait with a genetic basis, but an expression of universal sexual and emotional drives, has validity. Yet it does not answer the question of why the development of sexual orientation has evolved to be so flexible as to allow an indiv...