More on the Pianka Debacle

It looks like our good friend Pianka, the prof who was alleged by wacko creationists to call for the deliberate killing of billions of people by airborne viruses is probably just as wacko as Demski. The debate rages on at Hit and Run, the blog of Reason Magazine:

Check out, too, this interesting post in the Daily Kos comments thread from Neil Sinhababu, a UT graduate student in philosophy who closely knows people who work with Pianka:

I just asked them if this sounded like something Pianka would actually say. The grad student laughed and told me that Pianka is in fact crazy, and has repeatedly said in classes that it'd be good if devastating diseases would wipe out 90% of the human population. There were freakish references to "our friend, AIDS."

He has a history of other bizarre behavior too. The professor says that whenever new prospective faculty are brought into the biology department and meet Pianka, Pianka likes to puts his feet up on his desk and loudly say, "We're all fucked!" (This is apparently how the professor himself was greeted.) The biology department has started making sure that new hires meet the other ecologists before they meet Pianka, so as to make clear that not all Texas ecologists are insane.