Today, to my dismay, I rediscovered this, a Dr. Pianka who publicly proposed the use of the airborne Ebola virus to kill off 90% of the human race. This man, a member of the Texas Academy of Science and chairman of its Environmental Science Section, received a standing ovation from students and Academy members when he gave a talk on the matter at the University of Texas at Arlington. As Eliezer Yudkowsky points out at Overcoming Bias, it’s silly to be “surprised” by something like this: given the professor’s knowledge set and lax sense of ethics, exterminating 90% of the human population with a flesh-eating virus must seem like a great solution to the planet’s problems, or he wouldn’t be talking about it in the first place.
Via Anissimov. Read the original article here.
August 13, 2007 at 4:49 am
The rest of the world wholeheartedly support this way of reducing the population on earth and suggest that the culling starts in Texas, preferably in a closed lab containing one Dr. Pianka.
August 15, 2007 at 5:17 pm
I know Pianka indirectly, as my wife was in his department as a graduate student. Pianka is freak of the highest order, and part of his freakiness is his inclination to elaborate practical jokes. I suspect this falls into that category: an elaborate, dark joke in the tradition of Swift’s “Modest Proposal.”