T thiswasgone here is some recent literature suggesting exactly what you are saying is disingenuous ie pandas being carnivores surviving as herbivores:
And sourced from that same article, some literature suggesting the opposite of what you said earlier ie pandas are an evolutionary dead end:
Giant Pandas Are Not an Evolutionary cul-de-sac: Evidence from Multidisciplinary Research
The giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) is one of the world’s most endangered mammals and remains threatened by environmental and anthropogenic pressure.academic.oup.com
Sorry if this is too "red herring" for you. (Ha!)
As for your article, this is the equivalent of a US institution attempting to prove a political point through a meta analysis of articles that only agree with their point. I'll briefly go over each point they address:
1) Adaptation to a Specialized Bamboo Diet
There is nothing much to say here as they addressed all of it basically. Giant pandas evolved to hyper specialize into a dietary niche because it was both low-energy and plentiful during a time period where food was intermittently scarce and bamboo was widely available in the region.
2) Response to Bamboo Flowering
True and false. It is true that natural hindrances to bamboo flowering exist and overall the species did overcome them but that was because in the past their range was much wider than it was now. Once again, as touched upon in my previous post, this was acceptable because megafauna had yet to evolve to min-max in a jungle environment and use bamboo as a food source. However, because humans exist and did change the environment we'll never know how long it would take for these factors to influence the fate of ailuropoda melanoleuca. In addition, as seen in history, the last peak cooling event nearly wiped out all giant pandas; another event at the same or slightly worse scale but simply longer would likely result in total extinction for this species due to their over-reliance on a single foodtype, bamboo.
3) Population History, Population Biology, Genetic Diversity
An all in once response for all 3 sub-headers as they roughly outline the same thing which is the hope and future of this species. As mentioned in my previous post, giant pandas are a biennial breeding species; only reproducing once every two years. While not an uncommon reproductive strategy, it is typically only successful when the species in question is the apex within it's breeding range but as a result it's very susceptible to external factors such as new species and environmental changes. An example of this is the polar bear, they typically reproduce every 3 years (less depending on cub mortality) and without a doubt are the apex of all terrestrial animals in the Artic. Effectively going the opposite path of giant pandas, they have an omnivorous system but have evolved to live off of a mainly carnivorous diet due to the environment they live in. However, similar to the giant panda, as a result of hyper-specializing for a particular biome and food source (seals) they are heavily affected by any changes to seal populations & any small lasting change to their environment. Overall another potential genetic dead-end although there is the real possibility of a new sub-species created through brown & polar bear cross breeding. Thus, unlike giant pandas, genetic diversity is not that much of an issue if grizzly-polar hybrids do develop into a new species.
Genetic diversity is also not that large of an issue in wildlife as it is in humans as natural predators, sibling killings, etc. all tend to remove all populations with "negative" traits. Thus, before inbreeding can become a significant issue (typically requires several generations of direct inbreeding: Father-daughter, Mother-son, etc.), species population tend to bounce back up so long as the habitat they reside in can support the population numbers. Once again though, due to the nature of the giant panda's hyper-specialization to bamboo forests they are highly suceptible to extinction events.
4)Hope for the Giant Panda
China will never let this species die; no need for hope and this paper was made for funding.
