WHY NOT JUST LET PANDAS DIE OUT? The question is raised in this month's Touchstone. From a strictly Darwinian prospective, the Giant Panda is a flop like none known to science. Their diet consists almost exclusively of incredibly non-nutritious (even to them!) leaves and bark. They seem to hate mating, have trouble getting pregnant when they do mate, have trouble carrying to term when they do get pregnant, and are horribly negligent parents when they do carry to term. They seem determined to go extinct. Darwinism is the survival of the fittest, and the fittest they ain't. I'm not saying we should wipe them out, but are we obliged to make a heroic effort to preserve them?

And yet we do. We exert huge amounts of money and energy trying to preserve this fat, dichromatic race of raccoons. (They didn't become the official animal of the World Wildlife Fund for nothing. We love these goofy bastards!) But why? It could be because they're cute. We may struggle to preserve the panda for the same reason we restored the Sistine Chapel ceiling: because they appeal to us aesthetically, and we want future generations to appreciate their aesthetic appeal. Or perhaps, as I've suggested earlier, it has to do with our Frankenstein-like fascination with controlling the creation of life.

I kind of like the theory suggested at the end of the Touchstone piece: that even Darwinian materialists can't quite shake some kind of vestigial sense of the role of man as steward of this world, that, entirely divorced from what we want, humankind has an objective obligation to care for the natural world, even (especially) those parts of it (like the panda) that are entirely incapable of taking care of themselves.

OK, that's enough pandablogging for a long, long time.