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.

  • prole@sh.itjust.works
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    11 months ago

    Yeah, there are entire books in the OT dedicated to lineage, and I’m pretty sure it’s all been debunked. It’s not a historical document in any way whatsoever.

    • LesserAbe@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Lol I mean how do you debunk something that wasn’t originally intended to be a scientific document. (I know that’s not the mindset among Christians)

      • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Ok it has been debunked because the events described are often not only internally inconsistent they do not match up with what we now know. And before you start on “it’s an analogy” keep in mind it wasn’t for the people who wrote it and lived with it as well as the confusion of what it is an analogy for.