In the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ publication, Is There a Creator Who Cares About You? (see here )

They cite a quotation by Richard Dawkins to defend the idea that humans are “special.”
In chapter 4, How unique you are!, on page 69, under they heading You Can Contemplate the Future and Plan for it they say:

…When asked whether humans have traits that distinguish them from animals, Professor Richard Dawkins acknowledged that man has, indeed, unique qualities. After mentioning “the ability to plan ahead using conscious, imagined foresight,” Dawkins added: “Short-term benefit has always been the only thing that counts in evolution: long-term benefit has never counted. It has never been possible for something to evolve in spite of being bad for the immediate short-term good of the individual. For the first time ever, it’s possible for at least some people to say, ‘Forget about the fact that you can make a short-term profit by chopping down this forest; what about long term benefit?’ Now I think that’s genuinely new and unique.”

What do you think to this? Should they be allowed to do this? I would not have thought they asked Dawkins permission to use those quotations in such a context.

(The JWs have cited Dawkins before, usually to criticize him, in How did life get here? Evolution or Creation and in another magazine where they disagree with the quote “Evolution is as much a fact as the heat of the sun.”)

I’m not a JW, although thanks to them calling around I’ve picked up a few books and such they’d left.

Fair Use means you do not need permission to quote someone

pawiz wrote:Fair Use means you do not need permission to quote someone

So they could've made that up. The quote isn't even sourced.

Malachi45 wrote:

pawiz wrote:Fair Use means you do not need permission to quote someone

So they could've made that up. The quote isn't even sourced.

That is very likely. Or at least taken out of context and mined.

I studied that book back in '99 or 2000 (when I was still a devout/baptised JW), so it's been quite a while for me.

The quote seems to be from an interview Dawkins had with Jaron Lanier back in or around 1996. Here's the link to the repost at the RichardDawkins.net site.

RD: You can simply say that in humans there was a gradual emergence of certain qualities that no other species has.

JL: Can you name those qualities?

RD: One of them is language. Another is the ability to plan ahead using conscious, imagined foresight. Short-term benefit has always been the only thing that counts in evolution; long-term benefit has never counted. It has never been possible for something to evolve in spite of being bad for the immediate short-term good of the individual. For the first time ever, it's possible for at least some people to say, `Forget about the fact that you can make a short-term profit by chopping down this forest; what about the long-term benefit?' Now I think that's genuinely new and unique.

Nail on the head. The central flaw with Darwinism is the lack of any foresight. Any idiot can understand that if you don't know what you doing, you will hit a dead end. The evolutionists respond with incredibly imaginative and speculative notions of "exaptation" but it simply doesn't hold any water scientifically.

Atheistoclast wrote:Nail on the head. The central flaw with Darwinism is the lack of any foresight. Any idiot can understand that if you don't know what you doing, you will hit a dead end. The evolutionists respond with incredibly imaginative and speculative notions of "exaptation" but it simply doesn't hold any water scientifically.

Please expand on why a process without a goal must hit a dead end?

Evolutionary dead ends are hit all the time - it's called extinction. This, however, completely ignores the power of selection acting upon entities that are not currently "dead ends".

Atheistoclast wrote:Nail on the head. The central flaw with Darwinism is the lack of any foresight. Any idiot can understand that if you don't know what you doing, you will hit a dead end. The evolutionists respond with incredibly imaginative and speculative notions of "exaptation" but it simply doesn't hold any water scientifically.

You clearly don't have a good grasp of basic evolution and what it meant when one says that it has no foresight. Evolution has no foresight because it doesn't look ahead and decide what genes it should keep in order to maximise an organsism fitness. It simply favours that genes that increase the fitness of an organism at that point in time. That innevitable meany that sometimes genes are that are useless in the future are retained whilst those that might be useful in the future can be lost.

Simple example is Icefish which have lost the genes that code for haemoglobin because there was no selective pressure to conserve these genes given that the water is cold enough to carry enough oxygen in their circulatory system without needing the help of haemoglobin. Of course if water temperatures increase (Which will occur at some point in our worlds future) then this species will go extinct because it not longer has the capability to produce haemoglobin and so unless it evolves some other way to enchance oxygen transportation. This is a lack of foresight in evolution.

It is believed that the vast majority of species that have ever existed have gone extinct. A lack of foresight in evolution is no doubt a large contributory to these extinctions.

Atheistoclast wrote:Nail on the head. The central flaw with Darwinism is the lack of any foresight. Any idiot can understand that if you don't know what you doing, you will hit a dead end. The evolutionists respond with incredibly imaginative and speculative notions of "exaptation" but it simply doesn't hold any water scientifically.

I don't understand why that would be a central flaw. If you have a process with no foresight, that selects based on a criteria, that criteria being what improves a creature's fitness in the NOW, then obviously in the future the conditions conducive to that fitness can change and inevitably lead to the extinction of a wide variety of creatures. The life we see around us is only 1% of the life-variety to have ever existed. I don't see a problem here.

Care to further explain exactly why you find this hard to believe?

OP:What do you think to this? Should they be allowed to do this? I would not have thought they asked Dawkins permission to use those quotations in such a context.

What he said seems to be right for the most part. The only problem I have with it is someone with little to no biology education may see the fact that humans have 'unique properties' as somehow meaning a process common to all life could not have been solely responsible for our coming into existence.

I don't see how the Dawkins quote argues against evolution. Though I do see how creationists might try to distort it to make it appear as if it does.

just wait, they got new brochures out on this.

as my family are all JW, (and they dont know I dont give a shit for religion) I've had to suffer a lot of listening to shit about evolution being "only a theory"...

both new brochures are about the origins of life, (one of which is properly referenced, but I'm fairly certain all the quotes are well out of context. theres at least 1 contribution from RD in there.

gave me a laugh reading them, the entire argument is, its complex, so surely its more likely to be designed than to accidentally happen....

Do you have a quote/link to the RD 'contribution'? I haven't seen the new brochures (yet). I'm sure I'll see them next week, when I'll be visiting my JW parents...

the 2 are

"Was life Created?"

"The Origin of Life - five questions worth asking"

(the questions being, How did life begin, is any form of life really simple, where did the instructions come from, has all life descended from a common ancestor, is it reasonable to believe the bible)

a quick scan doesn't flag up the quote, but I'm certain it was in there (on the basis I remember thinking he'd be amused at their use of the quote to support creationism)
[edit] the only mention I see now is this quote "Evolution is as much a fact as the heat of the sun", however I thought it was part of a paragraph, rather than part of the heading, so dont think its that quote