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.
We can think practically about knowledge too.
I put my hand on a hot stove, it burns, I remove my hand and the burning stops. Isn’t that knowledge?
Yes, of course, but it’s not the extent of knowledge.
Nor is it universal knowledge. What burns your hand isn’t going to burn other materials, or even other organisms.
There’s always a limit to what can be perceived with the organic senses. That’s the axiomatic flaw of empiricism.
What do you think? What is knowledge?
Are you suggesting there may be forces or powers we can’t yet measure?
Because that’s pretty much what science has been about for all of human evolution. We’ve observed events, and then tried to work out why they happen, and yet in all that time we’ve been unable to prove, or disprove god.