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.
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.
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.”