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.
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.
Cognitive Dissonance. I was raised very devout and I did it for years. It doesn’t confuse me, it evokes pity. I get to see people making the same fucking mistake I made and it hurts.
I made that mistake, no one else has to. Rip the band-aid off!
yep, same, for years. you WANT it to be true, so you ignore the contradictions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
