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.

  • floofloof@lemmy.ca
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    9 months ago

    It’s already there in the summary of the article. They’re calling it religious discrimination.

    • Mario_Dies.wav@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      9 months ago

      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.

    • rustyfish@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      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.