UT professor criticized over comments about impending pandemic

Star-Telegram ^ | April 4, 2006 | LIZ AUSTIN

[beaversmom]

AUSTIN - A University of Texas biology professor has been targeted by talk radio, bloggers and vitriolic e-mails - including a death threat - after a published report that he advocated death for most of the population as a means of saving the Earth.

But Eric Pianka said Monday his remarks about what he believes is an impending pandemic were taken out of context.

"What we really need to do is start thinking about controlling our population before it's too late," he said. "It's already too late, but we're not even thinking about it. We're just mindlessly rushing ahead breeding our brains out."

The public furor began when The Gazette-Enterprise of Seguin, Texas, reported Sunday on two speeches Pianka made last month to groups of scientists and students about vanishing animal habitats and the explosion of the human population.

The newspaper's Jamie Mobley attended one of those speeches and also interviewed Forrest Mims, an amateur scientist and author who heard Pianka speak early last month before the Texas Academy of Science.

After the newspaper's report appeared, it was circulated widely and posted on "The Drudge Report." It quickly became talk radio fodder.

The Gazette-Enterprise quoted Pianka as saying disease "will control the scourge of humanity. We're looking forward to a huge collapse."

Pianka said he was only trying to warn his audience that disease epidemics have happened before and will happen again if the human population growth isn't contained.

He said he believes the Earth would be better off if the human population were smaller because fewer natural resources would be consumed and humans wouldn't continue to destroy animal habitats. But he said that doesn't mean he wants most humans to die.

But Mims, chairman of the academy's environmental science section, told The Associated Press there was no mistaking Pianka's disdain for humans and desire for their elimination.

"He wishes for it. He hopes for it. He laughs about it. He jokes about it," Mims said. "It's got to happen because we are the scourge of humanity."

David Marsh, president of the Texas Academy of Science, did not return telephone and e-mail messages seeking comment. No recording or transcript of either that speech or another delivered last Friday at St. Edward's University in Austin was available for review by the AP. The Gazette-Enterprise said it reviewed a transcript of the original speech, which was provided on the condition that it not be distributed.

Allan Hook, a St. Edward's biology professor who heard both speeches, said Pianka "wasn't so perhaps adamant in his own personal views of what he thinks might happen" in his second lecture.

But Hook declined to elaborate on what Pianka said in the earlier speech, which Pianka delivered while being honored as the academy's 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist.

University of Texas officials don't plan to take any action against Pianka, university spokesman Don Hale said.

"Dr. Pianka has First Amendment rights to express his point of view," Hale said. "We have plenty of faculty with a lot of different points of view and they have the right to express that point of view, but they're expressing their personal point of view."

ON THE NET

Prof. Eric Pianka's UT Web site, http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/varanus/eric.html

Texas Academy of Science, http://www.texasacademyofscience.org/

Seguin Gazette-Enterprise, http://www.seguingazette.com/

[Shimmer128]

Yeah, too bad his parents weren't more worried about breeding their brains out. They could have nipped him right in the bud, so to speak.

[wizardoz]

Well, if only the socialists died, it WOULD be a good thing...

[Tench_Coxe]

Sounds like a fellow traveller named Paul Mirecki. Wonder how long it will be before 'two white hicks in a pickup truck' suddenly give him two dubiously black eyes?

[stinkerpot65]

Figures.

[AZ_Cowboy]

I'm not angry so much as I am amused by the fact that this sort of thinking is still around.

Well, at least we have it from the horse's mouth. Then again, many elitists have always had a soft spot for population control. A smaller population is a more easily controlled population.

[stinkerpot65]

Typical of what you will find in Austin.

[BookmanTheJanitor]

A University of Texas biology professor has been targeted by talk radio, bloggers and vitriolic e-mails - including a death threat

Okay, I'm confused is the professor viewing the death threat as a good or bad thing? :o)

[AZ_Cowboy]

That all depends on whether or not his job is placed on the line...

[AZ_Cowboy]

I know it all too well. Austin is hardly an anomaly for that sort of thing, though.

[beethovenfan]

Well, we white folks aren't breeding our brains out.
All the white women are having abortions.

[babygene]

"We're just mindlessly rushing ahead breeding our brains out"

Oh we are, are we? Seems to me that we barely have a birth rate high enough to sustain our (U.S) civilization. Are we going to keep things up by importing under achievers from third world countries. (ever wonder why these countries are "third world"?)

[Onelifetogive]

"What we really need to do is start thinking about controlling our population before it's too late," he said.

"I'm all for population control Prof. Pianka.....you go first..."

[babygene]

"All the white women are having abortions."

That's not really accurate. A disproportionate number of abortions are by black women.

White women are not having as many babies due to birth control and careers.

Black women comprise 14% of the population and have 40% of the abortions. I'm not condemning them any more than I would anyone else. Since most of the black kids are born to single mothers, I would probably be more understanding.

[AuburnMan]

This false economic theory is generally attributed (originally) to Thomas Malthus and is often referred to as Malthusian Economics. His predecessors predicted global apocalypse in the 1970s, due to overpopulation and resource depletion. I'd be curious to hear him explain why the U.S. food supply has tremendous surpluses while the number of farmers has sharply decreasing since the 1950s.

Consider the following excerpts from an article entitled "The Malthusian Trap," from the Ludwig von Mises Institute (the premiere center for the Austrian School of economics). I highly recommend this as a short and informative article on a subject that is more pervasive in liberal thought than most people know (even many liberals who espouse these ideas don't fully understand them). This article may be found at: http://www.mises.org/story/1675

"Any numbskull can find statistics to show that if the resource base stays the same and population increases then all hell will break loose. This is the Malthusian mirage. Based on this sophisticated doctrine, believers go around telling people that we should desist from further folly, for the impending threat of doom is ever looming. And government, of course, is our only hope. Another silly use of this method is finding out that the population of Italy is decreasing, hence, they project that after a while there will be no Italians left."

"It is true that if the American continent had never been populated many millions of miles of square forest would remain intact. But so what? Which are more important, people or trees? For if a flourishing conservation lobby in 1600 had insisted that the existing wilderness would remain intact, the American continent would not have had room for more than a handful of fur trappers. If man had not been allowed to use these forests, then these resources would have been truly wasted, because they could not be used. What good are resources if man is barred from using them to achieve his ends?

Then there is the common argument that at any time a natural resource is used, any time a tree is chopped down, we are depriving future generations of its use. And yet this argument proves far too much. For if we are to be prohibited from felling a tree because some future generation is deprived of doing so, then this future generation, when it becomes "present," also cannot use the tree for fear of its future generations, and so on to prove that the resource can never be used by man at all—surely a profoundly "anti-human" thesis, since man in general is kept in subservience to a resource which he can never use."

[Dave Olson]

"We're just mindlessly rushing ahead breeding our brains out."

Ben Wattenberg wrote The Birth Dearth in which he says that the opposite is happening. According to him, although the world's population is growing, the world wide average birth rate is about half of what it was 50 years ago. And IIRC, he said that if that rate continues to drop like it has, the world's population will start to shrink around mid-century.

[Fruit of the Spirit]

"But he said that doesn't mean he wants most humans to die. "

That's not what I read! And, mind you, he wouldn't allow any taping of any kind while he gave his 'death knell' speech.

[Bonaparte]

You want population control, Professor Pianka? Then why don't you set a good example and start the ball rolling? Don't worry about us. We'll somehow get by without you.

[Wilhelm Tell]

Methinks this Doctor is a "Little Eichmann." Funny how when there is a true Little Eichmann in their presence, the leftists will always praise him.

[Wilhelm Tell]

I predict that if the earth's population is not immediately reduced to a handful of tenured professors, the giant dragon-gods will get angry and swallow the sun. The many so-called solar eclipses are proof of this. And I predict that this will happen before 1970. Now I expect to be worshipped as a prophet and be given a nice, tenured professorship.