The Continuing Collapse of Scientific Authority -- Meet Doctor Doom

Citizen Scientist reports on the sheer lunacy of the environmentalist fringe.

During this year's annual meeting of the Texas Academy of Science Dr. Eric R. Pianka was honored as the 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist. He responded with a speech in which he..., well, here is a description by Forrest Mims, Chair of the Academy's Environmental Science Section.

One of Pianka's earliest points was a condemnation of anthropocentrism, or the idea that humankind occupies a privileged position in the Universe. He told a story about how a neighbor asked him what good the lizards are that he studies. He answered, “What good are you?”

Pianka hammered his point home by exclaiming, “We're no better than bacteria!”

Pianka then began laying out his concerns about how human overpopulation is ruining the Earth. He presented a doomsday scenario in which he claimed that the sharp increase in human population since the beginning of the industrial age is devastating the planet. He warned that quick steps must be taken to restore the planet before it's too late.

....

Professor Pianka said the Earth as we know it will not survive without drastic measures . Then, and without presenting any data to justify this number, he asserted that the only feasible solution to saving the Earth is to reduce the population to 10 percent of the present number.

He then showed solutions for reducing the world's population in the form of a slide depicting the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse . War and famine would not do, he explained. Instead, disease offered the most efficient and fastest way to kill the billions that must soon die if the population crisis is to be solved.

Pianka then displayed a slide showing rows of human skulls, one of which had red lights flashing from its eye sockets.

AIDS is not an efficient killer, he explained, because it is too slow. His favorite candidate for eliminating 90 percent of the world's population is airborne Ebola ( Ebola Reston ), because it is both highly lethal and it kills in days, instead of years. However, Professor Pianka did not mention that Ebola victims die a slow and torturous death as the virus initiates a cascade of biological calamities inside the victim that eventually liquefy the internal organs.

After praising the Ebola virus for its efficiency at killing, Pianka paused, leaned over the lectern, looked at us and carefully said, “We've got airborne 90 percent mortality in humans. Killing humans. Think about that.”

Read the whole thing here.

This is not some marginal figure. Pianka holds an endowed chair at UT Austin, has won Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships as well as a post-doc at Princeton. He serves on the editorial board of American Naturalist, BioScience, National Geographic Research, and other major forums. Each year he is invited to speak on campuses across the nation on environmental matters -- and he is a raving lunatic.

He has suggested that the obvious solution to the oil crisis is the extermination of two thirds of the human race.

Before speaking, he demanded that all recording devices in the auditorium be shut off because, as he told the audience, the general public is not ready to hear what he has to say.

What about the few hundred professional scientists in the audience? They received his talk with a standing ovation.

The audience laughed when he said, “You know, the bird flu's good, too.” They laughed again when he proposed, with a discernable note of glee in his voice that, “We need to sterilize everybody on the Earth.”

After noting that the audience did not represent the general population, a questioner asked, "What kind of reception have you received as you have presented these ideas to other audiences that are not representative of us?"

Pianka replied, "I speak to the converted!"

Remember, this is a professional gathering of environmental scientists. And nobody..., NOBODY, stood up to denounce this insanity. The questions directed toward Dr. Pianka mostly dealt with what would be the most efficient way to effect the mass extermination.

And, some of the graduate students in attendance were obvious, and self-proclaimed disciples of the mad doctor. This worries Mims. He writes:

Must now we worry that a Pianka-worshipping former student might someday become a professional biologist or physician with access to the most deadly strains of viruses and bacteria? I believe that airborne Ebola is unlikely to threaten the world outside of Central Africa. But scientists have regenerated the 1918 Spanish flu virus that killed 50 million people. There is concern that small pox might someday return. And what other terrible plagues are waiting out there in the natural world to cross the species barrier and to which scientists will one day have access?

Meanwhile, I still can't get out of my mind the pleasant spring day in Texas when a few hundred scientists of the Texas Academy of Science gave a standing ovation for a speaker who they heard advocate for the slow and tortuous death of over five billion human beings.

This is scary, kids. Really scary! And it serves as an extreme example why scientific authority cannot be allowed to direct public policy. There is a dangerous tendency in the MSM and in some elements of the Democratic party to accept the pronouncements of scientific authority and to disregard, or even to demonize, those who would raise moral or political objections to its dictates. But, as the professional response to Dr. Doom makes clear, institutional "science" must always be subject to moral and political oversight. Dubya understands this. All too many of his critics do not.

UPDATE:

Dr. Doom's pronouncements are causing quite a little stir at UT and are raising questions about the limits of academic freedom. Read it here.

Does a professor who advocates the extermination of 5.8 billion people cross the boundary? I think so. Like Ward Churchill, Prof. Pianka brings disrepute upon his profession and in doing so endangers many of the freedoms currently enjoyed by denizens of the sacred halls of academe.

AND THIS:

Excitable Andrew Sullivan, in his characteristic style, uses Dr. Doom's pronouncements as a springboard for an attack on Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Sen. McCain, and even identifies
the religious right with Ahmadinejad. It's a breathtaking example of journalistic guilt by tenuous and strained association and further proof that a once- respectable journalist is rapidly descending into mindless, knee-jerk, gibberish. I used to respect Sully, but he's making it harder and harder to continue to do so.

Read his despicable rant here.

UPDATE:

Pianka is starting to back away from his statements see here. But that isn't really the point. What was frightening was not the fact that one award winning scientist was a loon, but that a body of his peers wildly applauded his genocidal views.