Mike Dunford explains why at Panda’s Thumb:
http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2006/04/the_seguin_gaze_1.html

Cheers, Dave

Second, the letter from Pitts “corroborating” Mims’s account, looks remarkably similar to everything else I’ve seen spewing out of the right-wing spin machine on this. Is there any reason to credit his account any more seriously than all the other dutiful spin-amplifiers, just because he has a degree (in an unrelated field) from UT-Austin? Most particularly: did he hear the speech in question, or is he just taking Mims’s account at face value?

“I’ve found that it takes courage to tell people what they don’t want to know,” Pianka, 67, told the newspaper.

A Gazette-Enterprise reporter who heard Pianka speak Friday on the same topic quoted him saying disease “will control the scourge of humanity. We’re looking forward to a huge collapse.”

*****************
From the Seguin Gazette:

James Pitts, who recieved a Ph.D. in physics from UT-Austin, [is] the second to publicly chastise Pianka when he filed a complaint Saturday with the UT board of regents. He insists a state university is no place to disseminate such views.

He writes:

“Pianka’s message does not fall within the realm of his professional competence as a biologist, because it is a normative claim, not a descriptive one. Pianka is encouraged to use his ecological expertise to predict the likely consequences of certain technological and reproductive strategies, but to evaluate some as good, bad, or worthy of prevention by genocide is the realm of philosophy or political science, not science. His message falls no more within his professional competence than it would for a physicist to teach religion in class or a musician to encourage racism.”
[...]
Because Pianka includes his doomsday material in his coursework, Ebola and its potential play a notable role in some students’ studies…In an evaluation of Pianka’s course – performed anonymously in keeping with university policy – one student offered:

“Though I agree that conservation biology is of utmost importance to the world, I do not think that preaching that 90 percent of the human population should die of Ebola is the most effective means of encouraging conservation awareness.”
[...]
Brenna McConnell, a biology senior, said she and others in the audience “had not thought seriously about overpopulation issues and a feasible solution prior to the meeting.” But though McConnell arrived at the event with little to say on the issue, she returned to Seguin with a whole new outlook.

An entry to her online blog captures her initial response to what’s become a new conviction:

”[Pianka is] a radical thinker, that one!” she wrote. “I mean, he’s basically advocating for the death for all but 10 percent of the current population. And at the risk of sounding just as radical, I think he’s right.”

“There was a good deal of shock and just plain astonishment at what he had to say,” [McConnell] said. “Not many folk come out and talk about the end of the human population in as candid of a manner as he did. Dr. Pianka received a standing ovation at the end of his talk, if that says anything. What he had to say was radical, no question about it, but that is not to say that at least some of what he had to say is not true.”