Scientist calls for elimination of 90 percent of Earth's human population.

[Jara sang]

http://www.sas.org/tcs/weeklyIssues_2006/2006-04-07/feature1p/index.html

But there was a gravely disturbing side to that otherwise scientifically significant meeting, for I watched in amazement as a few hundred members of the Texas Academy of Science rose to their feet and gave a standing ovation to a speech that enthusiastically advocated the elimination of 90 percent of Earth's population by airborne Ebola. The speech was given by Dr. Eric R. Pianka (Fig. 1), the University of Texas evolutionary ecologist and lizard expert who the Academy named the 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist.

[madrchsod]

1. it will happen anyway

it`s happened before and it will again. i think this time we will do it instead of nature

[Katherine Brengle]

6. I agree --

it isn't a happy thing, but it will happen eventually.

We are stubborn, with our technology and medicine and fallout shelters, but nature or our own ridiculous greed and need to lord over the earth will eventually undo us.

Funny he should say 90% -- a good friend of mine, who is not a scientist, said this very same thing a couple of days ago, off the cuff.

[long_green]

51. No, it will always be nature pulling the trigger no matter

who loads the gun.

[Warpy]

2. He's counting on being among the survivors, no doubt

I have never heard some twit from any discipline advocate thinning the human population who offers to go first. It's just never, ever happened within my hearing.

I can see why this loon chose lizards.

[WCGreen]

3. I volunteer the extended Bush family......

[The Straight Story]

4. Scares me more than fundies...

Talk about a 'rapture'!

Of course, the earth is doomed anyway in the future - sun blows up, etc and so on. Life is a crapshoot.

[YouthInAsia]

5. well, it would save the earth. n/t

[LisaL]

9. Maybe that's Bush's goal. And he doesn't need Ebola.

[LisaL]

7. There is a sweet guy.

[longship]

8. About Forrest Mims...

He's a nutcase who claims to be a scientist but spends a lot of time worrying about stuff like reconciling science with a literal interpretation of the Bible. He's a creationist who claims that Stephen J Gould believed that evolution never happened.

Oh. He's one helluva great electrical engineer, and likely a genius. But in the political or scientific sphere I wouldn't believe *anything* he claimed.

[LisaL]

10. I hope he doesn't get his hands on anything infectious, though.

[WindRavenX]

11. And now let the back-lash against the scientific community begin

:(

[Heidi]

21. Don't buy that story about Pianka.

Here's Pianka's defense against that rightwing-generated smear of Dr. Pianka, who's being characterized as a "lizard expert" with no authority to speak on population control. He is, in fact, a renowned academic who teaches evolutionary biology, and I'm about 99 percent certain that the "evolution" part of his curriculum is what got the Right's neuticles all inflamed. :grr:

Dr. Pianka's side of it: http://www.kristv.com/global/story.asp?s=4720802

[American liberal]

12. Without even clicking on the link, I could speculate that it's this sort

of "science" that drives the Bush agenda of the "haves and have mores." Most of the uneducated proletariates (sp) are expendable under the mantle of globalization. It's that sort of attitude that would justify Bush's lack of response to Katrina. Other than getting limbs shot off in the military, there's no use for the masses anymore. Automation has done away with the need for assembly line workers. Besides, poor people are more likely to be Democrats. No doubt, the have mores would be delighted if 90% of us went the way of the Dodo bird. That sort of thinking also (put on the tin foil hats for this one, folks) would go a looooooooong way toward explaining why a large percentage of the black underclass is in prison, hooked on crack, or somewher in between. (Remember the stories that have been circulating around since the '80s about the CIA's involvement in introducing crack and automatic weapons to the ghetto? The have mores want us to self-destruct.) One of these days I'll have to follow the paper trail of this "distinguished" scientist. I'm sure it would lead to very interesting places (and people).

[Heidi]

26. Dr. Pianka _doesn't_ want us to self-destruct.

But he lays out a scenario of how it could happen. I'm no evolutionary biologist, but we human beans do tend to think of ourselves as "above nature" (ie, having dominion over the earth)and we conduct our lives accordingly. On one hand, we kill other animals under the guise of preventing overpopulation and we argue that this sort of killing is necessary to the larger biosphere, yet a the same time, we express shock and surprise when a scientist suggests that an airborne virus might do the _very_ same thing to us. :shrug:

[EstimatedProphet]

37. Exactly-this is called "deep ecology" by some people

It's the idea that man is interfering with the natural ecology of the planet. And on one level, it's right, because we're overpopulating the planet which WILL result in massive die-offs due to starvation and disease if we continue. This doesn't have to be about the have-mores trying to clear out the 'rabble'. Besides, they need us: if we were gone who would the have-mores have to lord it over?

[Heidi]

40. Thank you, JEEZUS! Someone finally "gets" it.

I feel like I've been banging my head against the wall for 24 hours in these Pianka Crucifixion thread. :cry:

[EstimatedProphet]

42. LOL

sorry. I would have come in sooner but I just saw this.

[Heidi]

44. Here, have another.

Sorta like hair of the dog. ;)

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x835733

[SpiralHawk]

13. "lizard expert" ! WTF ?

Where is David Icke when we need him to weigh in on this revolting, reptilian development?

[Heidi]

18. He teaches Evolutionary Biology.

But "lizard expert" is how the fundies would describe an evolutionary biologist. Look deeper than the Drudge Report-generated article in the OP.

[Ganja Ninja]

22. "the Texas Academy of Science"! WTF?

:wtf:

[EstimatedProphet]

46. Texas Academy of Science is a branch of AAAS

http://www.aaas.org/

Each state has a local branch. this was Texas' branch meeting.

[BrklynLiberal]

14. Very misleading title which was discussed earlier today.

No direct quotes, only paraphrases by Mims who is a creationist. No tapes or transcripts of the speech are given. It would appear Dr. Pianka was actually talking about the devastion that the human race has wreaked on this planet and the inevitable consequences of overpopulation. There was never any joyous pronouncement about the death of millions.

Read the entire article and check the backgrounds of the authors before drawing conclusions.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x827024

[darkmaestro019]

15. I agree with those saying it'll happen again....

Nature has a way of fixing itself. I must take polite exception to someone who replied that "This time it'll be us and not nature" or something along those lines--WE are nature too, whether we like to admit it or not.

I have a schadenfreude sort of glee imagining the humans trying to deal with the REAL world suddenly with all their cute little rules and I'll-sue-you fake safety summarily removed. Finally, real, functional, practical intelligence would MATTER. Of the survivors of the catastrophe, whatever it was, only the smart and the strong would survive long-term--and credit score, fancy car, and expensive degree would be the useless trappings that they should be. It'd be the long-mocked tree-huggers the spoiled insulated shell-shocked fat cats would have to come crawling to, for food and water and how on Earth to set a broken bone. (sigh) (imagines nifty Road Warrior costume ; )

[soothsayer]

16. They say the Illuminati would like the world pop to fall to 500M

Dunno what that buys them. Control?

[Heidi]

17. For cryin' out loud, people! Think for yourselves!

The Drudge Report gave this non-story legs two days ago. There are _no_ direct quotes in the article, and not a single credible news organization has picked up the article.

If you want to know the truth about, what Eric Pianka said at the TAS meeting, why not email or call him and ask? http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~varanus/eric.html

Here's Dr. Pianka's side of the story: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=835733&mesg_id=835733

[theHandpuppet]

19. Thanks, Heidi

A voice of reason.

[Heidi]

20. Here's Dr. Pianka's side of the story:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=835733&mesg_id=835733

[rman]

23. Like Pianka is going to tell the truth, if he said what he alledgedly said

Supposedly video recordings were made of that meeting, and Pianka did not want his statements recorded. If he said nothing controversial, then why would he not want it on the record?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=228&topic_id=19251&mesg_id=19251

Something curious occurred a minute before Pianka began speaking. An official of the Academy approached a video camera operator at the front of the auditorium and engaged him in animated conversation. The camera operator did not look pleased as he pointed the lens of the big camera to the ceiling and slowly walked away.

This curious incident came to mind a few minutes later when Professor Pianka began his speech by explaining that the general public is not yet ready to hear what he was about to tell us.

[Heidi]

24. The general public isn't ready to hear about a lot of things.

Voter fraud is one of those things. The threat of overpopulation is another.

[theHandpuppet]

28. Yep...

And there are plenty of forces working in this world for whom the very rational notion of population control is an anathema.

[rman]

29. Then why are both being debated in the public arena?

What would happen if people would hear these things that they aren't ready to hear - yet that they have already heard about?

And please don't call it "voter fraud"; the term suggests that "voters" committed fraud, while in reality they did not. It is "election fraud".

[Heidi]

30. You're right. It was election fraud.

Perhaps, and this is only a guess, Dr. Pianka surmised that the public isn't ready to hear about the potential for a devastating pandemic because he doesn't want his remarks to get the same sort of fear-mongering spin that led to the war in Iraq. But that's only a guess. Fear-mongering about population control is unnecessary and there are perfectly rational solutions to over-population, like birth control; safe, legal, voluntary abortion; and education.

[EstimatedProphet]

43. Since when is a scientific meeting "the public arena"?

They're meetings for scientists. They have specialized information presented in them. People PAY to go to them-they are by definition private. The point of scientific meetings is to discuss information with peers-not to broadcast it to everyone.

[EstimatedProphet]

38. Have you ever given a paper at a scientific meeting?

I have. It wasn't recorded. I've never seen one recorded. He probably hadn't either, and I wouldn't blame him one bit if he didn't want a recording made if he didn't know it was going to be. As for the general public-it's never ready for scientific information as presented at a scientific meeting. For the layman it can be a lot like reading a stack of hexadecimal code sometimes.

So, it doesn't have to mean that he is trying to take over the world or anything.

BTW he has the right to turn down having his remarks recorded for whatever reason he wants-they are his remarks. Asking why he should mind if he's not got anything controversial to say is like asking why people would mind having their phone tapped if they aren't criminals.

[hyphenate]

35. Huh--the real scientist and I

seem to be in complete agreement, by his comments in the other thread as well. Regardless of how Drudge treats this article of news, which means he spins it to the right's POV exclusively, the fact remains that cutting our population is one of the few hedges we can make against complete and utter annihilation of the human race.

[paparush]

25. That's What the NeoCons have been saying for years!

This is right out of the NeoCon Utopian mindset...the speach probably came from a PNAC document entitled "Rebuilding America's Offenses"

[Heidi]

27. No, but the way the Right is _spinning_ it

may come from a rightwing PR handbook.

[bdot]

31. I like the way this man thinks although he should go for 100%.

[rman]

32. What, you have a death wish?

If so, i don't think you need any help from Pianka.

[leftofthedial]

33. and I won't even miss you nine other suckers

:sarcasm:

[hyphenate]

34. I have some issues with that

But on the other hand, if Man is to survive as a species, we do need to have a minus population growth, though 90% elimination is far too much. I would say civilization would survive at about 50%, though.

As far as airborne ebola, though, there are more likely means of extinction, including the bird flu virus which is rightly so feared. The decimation of the population when the similar virus came in the early 20th century was significant--applying that on a worldwide basis shows how horrendous the results can be.

It's not so much something to intentionally wipe out our civilization, but how with the current growth and foreseen future growth will result in a lack of resources that can handle a much larger population. We can see the effects already here, when large populations without proper sanitation, communicable diseases and lack of health facilities result in a very high death rate. Proper education can help, of course, but until the populations in such areas are able to understand better the nature of contagions and sanitation, the deaths will always be higher than in more modern countries.

The greediness of many also is hurting, building into areas where wild animals live, and where development will result in over-extension of resources. This includes areas where virgin rain forests are being clear cut to make way for development or for pastures for domestic cattle, sheep, and other "food" animals. By clear-cutting, we lose the protection of the rainforest, and contribute to the air pollution which is depleting the ozone layer.

Greed is also rampant in some areas where military power forms the main power authority in a country. Those who are leading by pure "might" alone, make certain that the grains and other food stores are selectively distributed, and some areas of population get no support at all. We've seen such in the past when we have tried to feed other nations, where the stores will never reach those needing them most, as coup leaders and other such dictators would rather see the grain stores go bad before sending them to these people.

If we were able to have a minus population growth, we would be better prepared to handle the resources of the planet, and not "wipe them out" as we are already doing. Such consumables as fossil fuels, mineral deposits and water are being too fast replaced with nuclear waste, non-drinkable water, and landfills with methane gas and other toxic emissions. We can not sustain these much longer, and unless we come up with replaceable resources, we will simply overrun the planet with toxins that we can not control.

It would be great if we could have someone reliable create nuclear fusion as a reality--it would eliminate much of the landfills, as we could use the materials currently relegated to landfills for fuel, for example, and we would be able to rely on fusion for a main power source as well. The ability to filter water would also give us more stores of such, and could be used for greater desalinization of sea water.

We are likely doomed to, at most, another five or six hundred years here on earth unless we work on some of these measures to stop doing to mother earth what we have already done. And, let's face it, until the past two hundred years, when massive technology advances made some of our lives more simple, the earth itself was in better shape for the first several billion years or more than it is today, and will continue to be, for a long time to come.

[BlooInBloo]

36. Justify your thread title please?

Show us the quote from this scientist where he/she called for the elimination of 90% of the population?

[Jara sang]

45. It says it in the article.

There is a link right there. NATURE it isn't, but it seems like a credible source. I have no opinion either way. I thought it merely an interesting article. Don't take my posting this as advocacy for anything.

[BlooInBloo]

47. YOU said "scientist calls for..."...

I didn't see a quote from the scientist where he called for what YOU claimed he called for.

Kindly show me that quote please?

The one where the scientist call for what YOU claimed he did - the extermination of 90% of the population.

Thanks!

[Jara sang]

50. You are being ridiculous.

The excerpt from the article is right there.

[BlooInBloo]

53. The article does NOT contain what YOU say the scientist said.

The article does NOT contain such a quote.

Do you recognize the difference between the following:

(a) Article claims scientist calls for the extermination of 90% of population

and

(b) Scientist calls for the extermination of 90% of population.


Which one did you use for your title? With what justification?

Ridiculous? Preferable to being false, misleading, and refusing to correct it. A mistake that's pointed out becomes a lie, if the person refuses to correct it.

All I want is the quote that where the scientist called for what YOU claimed he called for.

Or a retraction, if you agree that, to the best of your knowledge, the scientist didn't say that.

[Bridget Burke]

39. This story was discussed in detail yesterday at DU.

The links have already been posted here. And apparently it was all over Right Wing Talk Radio--when they were not discussing The Evil Mexican Flag.

Forrest Mims is the ONLY source for the story. He gives no direct quotations, but only his interpretation. "Citizen Scientist" is a reputable site, but check out the end of the article: "The views expressed herein are his own and do not represent the official views of the Texas Academy of Science or the Society for Amateur Scientists."

Forrest Mims has a BA in English from Texas A&M & a long history of writing for Radio Shack. He's made a name for himself in electronics & computer science--for someone with limited science education. However, he is a proponent of Intelligent Design. From a book review:

This well-organized guidebook of O’Leary’s journey through the world of Intelligent Design has the potential to lead many of the next generation away from the evolutionary fables that now pass for science. Her book is must reading for anyone who wants to understand the history and significance of the Intelligent Design movement. It also belongs in college and even high school classrooms.”

www.designorchance.com/press.html

People are taking the word of this Creationist that Dr Pianka recommended we kill 90% of Earth's people. Or--did Dr Pianka warn about future dangers? Since Dr Pianka's an Evolutionary Ecologist, I doubt that Mims is a reliable source.

[EstimatedProphet]

41. This is a non-story

1) It comes from Forrest Mims-not exactly a non-biased source.

2) I've been to Academy of Science meetings. They're boring. Nobody talks about evil plans to destroy the world. Mostly they talk about plankton.

[ToeBot]

48. Oh man, I thought I hid this thread already! Did someone re-post it?

Shame on you!

[BurtWorm]

54. There are two of these.

At least one of them should be locked.

[Marie26]

49. Evil scientists, good Creationists.

OK, I got it now.

[BurtWorm]

52. The thread title is misrepresentative of what the scientist said.

The scientist (Eric Pianka) did not call for anything but awareness about how dangerously overpopulated the earth is. Apparently, he, perhaps, inadvisably "wished for" a strain of virus that would cure the problem, but he never suggested it should be inflicted by humans on other humans. This thread title is more worthy of a conservative sight than a progressive one. It keeps a simplistic reading of a nuanced talk alive--much as a Republican reading of nuanced Democratic ideas misrepresent and devalue the ideas in question. This thread (or the title of it) does a disservice to DU.