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David Seaborg (born 1949) is an evolutionary biologist, peace activist, author and leader in the environmental movement. He serves as president of the World Rainforest Fund.

Life

David Seaborg was born on April 22, 1949, in Berkeley, California and is the son of Helen L. Seaborg and Nobel Laureate Glenn T. Seaborg (who discovered plutonium among other accomplishments). He attended and graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a bachelor's degree in zoology. Seaborg received his master's degree from the University of California, Berkeley. David Seaborg is an evolutionary biologist who showed that organisms evolve by feedback and that the genetic code is on an adaptive peak and not quite optimal for evolution. He has dedicated his career to environmentalism and was coincidentally born on Earth Day in 1949. He is listed in Who's Who in America, which publishes notable biographies and historical events. David Seaborg resides in Walnut Creek, California.

David Seaborg wrote two books on his hypothesis that all species except humans make their ecosystem better for life and cause an increase in biodiversity (number of species) in their ecosystem, in natural conditions, over sufficient time. The hypothesis, called the Autocatalytic Biodiversity Hypothesis, or Pachamama Hypothesis, also posits that ecosystems maximize biodiversity and that organisms have made Earth better for life, regulating temperature, creating an atmosphere high in oxygen, and building the soil, as well as other life-favorable ecosystem engineering feats. It further claims that genetic systems act to increase biodiversity. The books are "How Life Increases Biodiversity: An Autocatalytic Hypothesis" (2022) and "Organisms Amplify Diversity: An Autocatalytic Hypothesis" (2023), both published by CRC Press, Taylor and Francis Group (Boca Raton, London, New York). The Hypothesis was inspired by the Gaia Hypothesis, but is much more general and deep.

He wrote a popular book of poetry called "Honor Thy Sow Bug" that has gone through seven printings and is one of the few poetry books with author's commentary on his poems (Beatitude Press, Lansing, Michigan, 2008 and 2023). Its unusual introduction critiques contemporary poetry and lists ten qualities that make a good poem.

David Seaborg founded and heads the World Rainforest Fund (worldrainforest.org), a nonprofit foundation dedicated to saving the earth's tropical rainforests and biodiversity. He also founded and headed the Seaborg Open Space Fund, named in honor of his father, to raise money and awareness to save open space from development in central Contra Costa County, California. This fund raised $20,000 in less than a year to successfully help save Acalanes Ridge in Lafayette, California.

David Seaborg worked to conceive and secure passage through the Berkeley City Council an ordinance that would ban the use of old growth rainforest and redwood in all products used by the city of Berkeley. This ordinance also required all businesses contracting with Berkeley to stop using old growth rainforest and redwood in any of the products or services that Berkeley hired to use or perform as well as in any product that was sold to the city. He is currently working with the Berkeley city council to secure passage of an ordinance banning the use of plastic bags in grocery stores and plastic newspaper wrappings in the city.

Seaborg has published several scientific articles discussing biological topics such as evolution, behavioral plasticity, and biodiversity. He wrote an article entitled "The Greenhouse Diet" in the Earth Island Journal in the winter of 2004 that is a summary of the scientific research on the effects of high atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide other than global warming. This article states that as the amount of carbon dioxide in the air increases the plants grow larger but are less rich in nutrients despite the excess of carbon dioxide. Seaborg has also written a book consisting of a collection of poems entitled Honor Thy Sowbug (2008).

In the 1990s and part of the first decade of the 20th century, he served on the Board of Directors and as Vice President of the Club of Rome of the USA, the environmental think tank that published The Limits to Growth in the 1970s.

He was on the board of directors of the East Bay Chapter of the United Nations Association of the United States of America from 2006 to 2009. He gave the keynote address at their last annual meeting, and helped secure the passage of key resolutions on biodiversity and global warming and the Kyoto Protocol, at the local, state, and national levels of the UNA/USA.

He carried the Ten Commandments for the Earth, a version of the Ten Commandments for preserving the planet written by Ernest Callenbach, down Mount Sinai in Egypt, the mountain Moses allegedly carried the Ten Commandments down. He carried them on the back of a camel and presented them to a Bedouin youth, who represented indigenous people and the youth.

References

1. Seaborg, David (December 1, 2019). "The life and contributions to the periodic table of Glenn T. Seaborg, the first person to have an element named after him while he was still alive". Pure and Applied Chemistry. 91 (12): 1929–1939. doi:10.1515/pac-2019-0816. ISSN 1365-3075. S2CID 208747513.
2. "About Marquis". Marquis Whos Who History Timeline. Archived from the original on September 13, 2017. Retrieved April 27, 2022.
3. "red-dipper-llc - About". red-dipper-llc.
4. Seaborg, David (September 10, 2021). How Life Increases Biodiversity: An Autocatalytic Hypothesis. Boca Raton: CRC Press. doi:10.1201/9780429440137. ISBN 978-0-429-44013-7. S2CID 240834792.
5. Seaborg, David M. (May 7, 1999). "Evolutionary Feedback: a New Mechanism for Stasis and Punctuated Evolutionary Change Based on Integration of the Organism". Journal of Theoretical Biology. 198 (1): 1–26. Bibcode:1999JThBi.198....1S. doi:10.1006/jtbi.1998.0896. ISSN 0022-5193. PMID 10329112.
6. Seaborg, David M. (March 12, 1985). "Sexual Orientation, Behavioral Plasticity, and Evolution". Journal of Homosexuality. 10 (3–4): 153–158. doi:10.1300/J082v10n03_18. ISSN 0091-8369. PMID 6533173.
7. ^ Seaborg, David (2004). "The greenhouse diet". Earth Island Journal. 18 (4): 39–41. ISSN 1041-0406. JSTOR 43879201.
8. ^ "David Seaborg, Global Environmental Committee". Mount Diablo Peace and Justice Center. July 7, 2013. Retrieved April 27, 2022.
9. De Jesus, Janice (November 24, 2009). "David Seaborg's book of poetry includes opinions on good poems, today's poetry". Contra Costa Times.

External links

• Biography at the World Rainforest Fund
• Speech given by David Seaborg at the Wayback Machine (archived October 15, 2006) to American Atheists in 2000
• "David Seaborg: Rainforests and Global Warming", Steppin out of Babylon
• David Seaborg's twitter

• 1949 births
• Living people
• American activists
• American atheists
• Evolutionary biologists
• University of California, Davis alumni