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.
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.
https://sciencereligiondialogue.org/resources/what-do-scientists-believe-religion-among-scientists-and-implications-for-public-perceptions/
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.
Months are actually numbers and politics. For instance, August is named for Augustus Caesar and December basically means ‘tenth month.’
January is named for Janus, February for a religious feast, March for Mars and June for Juno (Jupiter’s wife). April may also be a goddess Apru but the connection is still not agreed upon.
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.
Make it 1969 for the moon landing. It would just be slightly off unix time which will annoy low level programmers forever.
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.
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.
He who smelt it, dealt it
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reasoning
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?
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.
While it is true it doesn’t mean it isn’t weird.