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.
Its interesting to see your post to be so controversial. People who thinks all scientists are atheists either just don’t know any scientists or never been out in the real world. There’s really no difference between scientists and any regular population. I’m a engineer and in my group of about 40 engineers, many of us are Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and some Atheists. We don’t let religion interfere with our work, and there’s no conflicts with each other. We do a mix of R&D in our work, and we build software and hardware that gets used by millions of consumers daily.
I agree with you. I think this is a result of the New Atheist preaching of guys like Dawkins and Hitchens. They’re rather crude and provacative in their anti-theism and their followers subsequently have a pretty simplistic view of a complex subject.
Of course, there are even more religious fundamentalists doing exactly the same rabble-rousing. It behooves us to ignore all extremists.