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.

  • eatthecake@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    If the chaos had lined up a bit later, or a bit earlier, we might not exist. Everything might be a bit different, almost as if this slightly different universe was perfectly designed for the slightly different creatures living in it. Magic.

    • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      If we didn’t exist we wouldn’t be here to wonder why we didn’t. The miracle isn’t that we fit the universe we live in, the muscle would be a universe that we don’t fit in and yet here we are.

      • eatthecake@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Yes. My point was that if the universe were a little different then we’d also be a little different. It’s all a weird crazy miracle though. Anything existing at all, or nothing existing, all incomprehensible, like magic.