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.

  • batmaniam@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    It’s just one of those things in terms of logic of the system giving rise outside of itself. Like I said, dogma and religion are two very different things. I just find a lot of beauty in the fact that science can predict literal apotheosis by our own definition; it’s inherent in the system. If someone chooses to see that and assign intent, I can’t argue.

    There’s just something amazing about a system which defines the conditions which are outside it’s grasp. It’s like how banach-tarski shows 1+0=2. Practical? Not really, but none the less… under certain conditions…