Russia’s science and higher education ministry has dismissed the head of a prestigious genetics institute who sparked controversy by contending that humans once lived for centuries and that the shorter lives of modern humans are due to their ancestors’ sins, state news agency RIA-Novosti said Thursday.
Although the report did not give a reason for the firing of Alexander Kudryavtsev, the influential Russian Orthodox Church called it religious discrimination.
Kudryavtsev, who headed the Russian Academy of Science’s Vavilov Institute of General Genetics, made a presentation at a conference in 2023 in which he said people had lived for some 900 years prior to the era of the Biblical Flood and that “original, ancestral and personal sins” caused genetic diseases that shortened lifespans.
How did that numpty ever end up in the Academy of Science in the first place?
Well it’s Russia so I’m gonna guess it was nepotism.
maybe he was banned from academia in soviet times for being a religious nutjob, and then he shown that “political discrimination get into any position free” card and they let him in no questions asked
Top guys are aging. Maybe he sold them an idea thet he can fix it? I mean, there’s many gossips about rich men turning from cosmetic surgery and sports to all kinds of fake science and mysticism just to stay there a little longer.
Christians will cite this as an example of them being persecuted. Guaranteed.
It’s already there in the summary of the article. They’re calling it religious discrimination.
I guess I should have added “around the world.” I was going to say “in the US,” but then I remembered some of my religious family in other countries who would definitely say this, too.
It’s the church. They call it religious discrimination when they aren’t allowed to discriminate others. Or murder. Point is they cry and get super hard when they can play the victim.
This story could also title “East European State under Western duress had to fire Christian top scientist with life-prolonging ideas” /s
a ‘christian’ ‘scientist’ that actually read
the first bits of the biblea few wikipedia pages on early biblical persons; and decided it was factual historical accounts.
It’s always confused me how someone that believes in a religion can be a scientist. They directly contradict each other. It just makes it sound like people are in denial.
With all due respect, my friend, you’re assuming a false dillema. The majority of academic scientists are religious, reflective of the general population’s religious affiliation.
Of course there are a minority of highly vocal outliers on both sides of the spectrum who profit from the discord, real or imagined.
Humans are fantastic at compartmentalization
Not throwing a pike here, but you are short sighted.
To think it needs to be compartmentalized or that religion and science are mutually exclusive is a false dilemma as said above.
Science can simply be the way that God/s would choose to interact with our world.
They’re not necessarily incompatible, technically, but I am very suspicious of anyone who claims to be a scientist yet are willing to believe such extraordinary claims despite a complete lack of evidence.
If they would never use such a low bar for evidence in literally anything else in their lives (such as, presumably, their academic and scientific career, which I hope didn’t involve “faith” at all), and yet are willing to completely suspend that need for evidence for their belief in the supernatural, then I don’t trust them.
This is the real issue. Sure, science and religion COULD exist at the same time, but science is all about not making assumptions where you can instead build data, and heavily distrusting anything you can’t build data for. Religion is specifically designed to never be tested. It can never be meaningfully supported or negated through observable mediums, which makes it the antithesis to science regardless of their potential coexistence.
According to the philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, making assumptions and dismissing contradictory data is a regrettable but very common part of the scientific process that eventually results in a shift in the paradigm of thinking. Every scientific theory that we know today has gone through these phases and will likely continue to change in the future.
So, because you don’t understand how can someone accepts that something they don’t have proof for, can exist, because they don’t have proof against after all, you’re ready to start doubting their professionalism or their capacity ?
That seem even more unscientific than what you tried to condemn through a fallacy.
Yes. And it’s just as likely that super-god created God to do exactly that.
But that’s not the point. The scientific mind requires evidence and repeatability. To believe in God without evidence or repeatability means they’ve compartmentalized that part of their thinking.
Can you prove that the scientific mind requires evidence and repeatability? That sounds like circular reasoning.
I have a hypothesis, I collect evidence, record the results and see if it supports the hypotheses.
The experiment is repetable.
Yes, of course. And we all love the results of this methodology.
It’s just that using the scientific method to prove the validity of the scientific method is circular reasoning. At some point, we have to think philosophically about the means of knowledge.
You’re claiming a fact out of one of your assumption.
That thread is delightful in irony today, lots of self proclaimed unbiased and scientific, acting very biased and unscientific.
There’s a few Neil DeGrasse Tyson clips I remember seeing around about various scientific and religious interactions.
Like he calls nonsense on the BCE/CE vs BC/AD change because scientists, and really most of scociety, operates on the Gregorian Calendar which was created by the Catholic Church under Pope Gregory XIII and is the most accurate calendar we’ve ever made to account for leap years. Why deny the creators of a fantastic calendar their due respect just because they were religious in a time when everyone was religious?
And in a different he also talked about the Baghdad House of Wisdom and how throughout the Middle Ages of Europe, Baghdad was a center of intellectual thought and culture, until the Fundamentalists got into power and declared manipulating numbers was witchcraft, and ended up being a huge brain drain in Baghdad for centuries.
NDT is a massive blowhard. I’m not religious but I got turned off by his weird interview with God thing.
He’s one of the profiteers, in my opinion.
His point about the change to BCE/CE is the actual nonsense. His point is that we should keep religious terminology being used in science? Out of respect for the creators? When have we ever done that? Science is secular and should be a secular pursuit. Every biologist and anthropologist shouldn’t have to reference Christ just to date their samples even if the calendar is the same. I respect NDT for his work but his awful takes like this hurt what he says often.
Planet names, days of the week, months, which year is zero - even that we have 7 days in the week - All of these are direct religious references that we’re fine with.
I think the BCE/CE thing is dumb because it’s just a religious calendar under a different name. It doesn’t change what Year 1 represents anymore than changing the spelling of a word changes its etymology. If we want a secular calendar we should do something like add a few thousand years to count from the founding of the first cities, or have it start in 1945 with the founding of the UN, or even 1970 when Unix time begins. As I see it, calling it the ‘common era’ does absolutely nothing to divorce the calendar from the birth of Jesus.
To an extent it depends how that religion interacts with science. There’s quite a few major foundational discoveries that came from priests and ordained clergy from the Catholic Church: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Catholic_clergy_scientists
Within the Catholic Church there are a few orders of clergy dedicated to scientific discovery, especially the Jesuits.
Granted a lot of them conducted science under the broad philosophy of better understanding the universe God created, but if the end result eventually improves the lives of people, I don’t see how that’s an inherently bad thing.
If we wanted to be a bit more accurate to the hustoru of the real world, religious fundamentalism is opposed to science.
Its definitely not true that science and religion have to contradict each other. Take Christianity—you can easily believe in scientific methods to discover the way the world works, while believing that ‘God’ is the Creator of those things.
Yes but that’s hardly the entirely of Christian belief. What about the part about living until 900 before?
Well, I suppose one way to reconcile those things is that God created genetic diseases at that point to punish us for our sin.
Why is it acceptable to make such a huge leap to “[…] Therefore there must be a god (and it’s this specific one)” without any evidence? How does that comport with scientific thought?
Why would it be acceptable to believe such an extraordinary claim for this one specific thing, and yet require adherence to the scientific method for literally any other claim they evaluate?
That inconsistency is concerning to me, and that’s why I don’t trust scientists who are religious.
A rare time I agree with Russia.
Bit of a tangent, but from what I can tell the language barrier (and cold war history) really doesn’t do Russia any favours. Because so many Russians speak poor English, they’re effectively cut off from the English speaking world.
Obviously, the Anglosphere has more than enough weird conspiracies, and there is some bleed through, but Russia has surprisingly popular stuff like Fomenko’s New Chronology. For those wondering:
Phantom time conspiracies are my favorite kind of dumbass conspiracies.
In the 80s and 90s people were so confused they believed in all kinds of scams. Charged water before the TV, gave money to financial pyramids, believed their kids dead in Afgan and Chechnya could be brought to life for a little donation, even japanese death cult Ayum Sinrikyo was filmed staying with Brejhnev and USSR got more of his followers than Japan itself. Some of these ceased to exist but some are still there, including that idiot, Dugin and others. One of the top programs on the TV in the 10s was an initially sceptical challenge show of self-named witches, mages, extrasensorically gifted people, that run for many seasons, and with time charlatans themselves started to use it as a kind of promotion to their services kek.
From all of them, at least Fomenko is too absurd to most and genuinely funny in how he intertwines random historical events and his own marasm. But all of them should go to court to be honest. Their success is just a symptom of bigger problems, but they further enable people’s idiotism and live in luxury extorting them.
Whoa, that’s a fun one! Thanks for sharing! I love reading about these really different conspiracy theories.
How long until this guy finds his way to Florida?
This is the brain drain in effect. Scientists and intellectuals fled russia when the war with Ukraine began and the sanctions were incoming.
Although the report did not give a reason for the firing of Alexander Kudryavtsev, the influential Russian Orthodox Church called it religious discrimination.
Yeah, I don’t think they care.
Anyone else find it funny how the values bleed over in both directions? It’s westerners that would complain about discrimination, in Russia, that’s just life. Life is hard, so no whining, more or less. Off to the front lines with you.
