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.
This sounds like a whole lot of mental gymnastics to me to justify the logic. While I can’t explain how everything came to be, it also can’t be explained how God came to exist and until either one is proven, it makes far more sense that things have adapted over a billion of years instead of a single entity that there isn’t a single shred of evidence to exist. Religion just doesn’t seem logical to me.