Alan, please illuminate for us: what is the area in which you currently work?
It seems to me that your smugly-held principle is a lovely ideal, but that it is really not often used in most of science:
"Do we know that nuclear fission won't blow up the world through all-out nuclear war?" "Not extactly." "Ok, let's not do it then."
"Let's send a space probe out to the edges of our galaxy with information on who we are and where we live!" "Wait, might that not potentially lead a dangerous alien race right to our door and annihilate us all?" "Maybe.” “Consider that plan scrapped!"
"Let's innoculate this horse with a virus that is killing people." "But wouldn't that potentially kill the horse?" "I suppose it's a possibility..." "Well then, no!"
"I will give you prescription antibiotics for the infection." "But what if these antibiotics eventually cause a supergerm that will no longer respond to antibiotics and will cause a pandemic?" "Oh yeah, nevermind. Good luck with that!"
"We will send medics into the underdeveloped country to help all those poor, sick people whose lives were destroyed by decades of war." "But their culture will not allow them to cut back on the number of children they will produce, who will stand to live longer lives with lowered death rates and we'll end up with global overpopulation!" "Shoot, didn't think of that. Ok, forget that idea, let 'em die miserably!"
Science wouldn't really progress if it was constantly stymied by unknown potential issues and unforeseen consequences that we'd have to use such precaution against. Yes, those who practice science have to weigh potential outcomes and the lesser of two evils is the one chosen in most cases (actually three evils: the least, inaction, would not be useful). I believe I can say that we did just that.
Meanwhile, back in Flor de Cafe, our decision to collect the birds involved several aspects:
1) the threat of the loss of the forest patches that were home to the birds collected to locals converting them to sun coffee plantations (which has been happening even after the discovery of Scarlet-banded Barbet, so any comment that the discovery of the antbird would immediately halt clearing is obviously not true).
2) the afore-mentioned national park that was staring at us over our shoulders with quite a bit of appropriate habitat, and the use of educated guessing and previous experience to extrapolate to potential distribution and conclude that the species is not likely to be restricted to Flor de Cafe
3) the fact that we didn't have permits to visit said park for the purposes of strolling, much less collecting
4) it seemed more important to us to get appropriate documentation of the existence of this bird while we had the opportunity, rather than potentially lose it to habitat destruction in the time necessary to get permits for the park, do an exhaustive search of all possible habitat and establish a factual and exact world population. Which actually doesn't exist for about 99.999% of the world's birds.
5) to be sure that birders, benefiting from the discovery by going to the site and seeing the bird some day, would be able to snipe at us online using blatant misinformation and without having actually investigated the situation, visited the site, or otherwise offset their negative remarks by providing evidence that they are actually adding usefully to the conversation.
So, Alan, other than not apologizing for having now, twice, incited an anti-collecting furor through the use of unverified hearsay that is demonstratively false (let me link to a Wikipedia page here, since you did so above:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation), what is your point?
