CelticBear’s Musings

I’ve been so busy with work and with evolving Old Norse, Old English, and Gaelic into alternate modern language forms for a role-playing game (gawd, I’m such a nerd!) that I haven’t had time to blog anything.
Until something riles me enough to, like this:
As reported today on Phil Plait’s “Bad Astronomy” blog, he links to a post on “The Austringer” blog regarding a professor in Texas who is predicting that due to overpopulation, we may soon reach a critical point in which (as in all cases of animal overpopulation,) biological mutations in bacteria will create a highly destructive pandemic killing off as much as 90% of the population.

It’s a controversial prediction, and while based on years of study and research, is not a certainty, but has been upheld as a probable result of overpopulation by other respected scientists and anthropologists. But here’s what has me riled: The fact that William A. Dembski of the ironically named “Discovery Institute” and extremely vocal and active proponent of Intelligent Design, has reported the professor to the Gestapo, I mean… Homeland Security! Here’s his blog stating as much: http://www.uncommondescent.com/index.php/archives/984.

The actions of the intolerant and ignorant Religious Reich is also remarked on in the popular science blog Pharyngula.

Because Professor Pianka’s research is based in the fundamentals of evolution, the ignorant squeaky wheels have decided to completely and utterly misunderstand and misrepresent Pianka’s prediction of human devastation as an advocation of human destruction. Here’s what Pianka himself says on the topic:

If humans do not control their own population (and we seem unwilling and unable to do so), then other forces will certainly act to control our population. The four horseman of the apocalypse (conquest, war, famine, and death) are all candidates. Most likely, lethal virulent microbes like HIV and Ebola zaire will set limits on the growth of human populations. HIV, by allowing infected hosts to survive years while they spread the virus and infect new hosts, has already become a pandemic, but it will be years before it decimates the human population. Although Ebola kills 9 out of 10 people, outbreaks have so far been unable to become epidemics because they are currently spread only by direct physical contact with infected blood. However, a closely related virus that kills monkeys, Ebola reston, is airborne, and it is only a matter of time until Ebola zaire evolves the capacity to be airborne.

This is from his own page: http://www.zo.utexas.edu/courses/bio213/why.html. You can read his own words, he’s predicting, NOT advocating!

Yet because of vocal anti-evolutionists like Forrest M. Mims III, the Religious Reich are contorting the entire subject in order to bash it and turn a concerned scientist into some sort of mad scientist, all because of their unfounded beliefs in a dogma.

And as Phil on “Bad Astronomy” states very well, the issue is that the ID’ers feel they have a right to not only express, but get forced into public schools their opinions, but when someone else expresses a scientific based concern that uses concepts they disagree with out of principle, then those people are State criminals and dangerous people that must be reported to the Gestapo… there I did it again. Sorry. “Homeland Security.”

It literally sickens me.