Rivera on Pandas...

The June issue of Touchstone Magazine has a reprint of a Breakpoint article by Roberto Rivera, re-titled to Of Pandas and Men. Besides highlighting the logical inconsistency evolutionists find themselves in whenever they presuppose morality, he also makes an interesting point regarding the so-called self-sacrifice that some humans will perform. Rivera states,

One hundred forty kilometers north of Chengdu in China’s Sichuan province lies the Wolong Nature Preserve, a 200,000-hectare area that contains approximately ten percent of the world’s giant pandas (Ailuropoda melanoleuca). Wolong’s Giant Panda Research Center, which was the subject of a recent Discovery HD Theater documentary, Panda Nursery, has made important breakthroughs in the breeding and raising of the endangered species. Panda Nursery documented the first six months in the lives of two giant panda cubs. For the staff, especially the head of the breeding program, ensuring their survival was a 24-hours-a-day-seven-days-a-week task. The head of the program told viewers that he only saw his own two-year-old daughter two days a month. ...the willingness of the breeding program director to spend time away from his own child to care for the panda’s was depicted as a sign of his dedication. What wasn’t noted was the irony that a member of the apex species would — forgive the way I’m putting this — sacrifice the care of its own young to care for the young of a species incapable of doing it on its own.

Perhaps the head of the breeding program really isn't being inconsistent with naturalism. Afterall, if we are nothing more than another member of the animal kingdom, then there really isn't any difference between a two year old human and a two year old panda. But the evolutionary mandate is that all we should be interested in is our own species survival. If we want to be true to naturalism then we have to consider ourselves Numero Uno. But morality keeps popping up its ugly head doesn't it? We keep tripping over that silly notion known as the right thing to do. Where did it come from?