Russia fires a top geneticist who claimed people could live to 900 before sins caused Biblical flood
Russia fires a top geneticist who claimed people could live to 900 before sins caused Biblical flood
A Russian state news agency says 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.
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.
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Bud, I literally just wrote out multiple paragraphs about how it isn't impossible. If the only thing you can think of to argue my point is to imagine I said something else, that should tell you something. Religion could be real, it could be fake. The only correct conclusion to draw is that we don't know. Have no faith in the existence of a god, have no faith in the lack of a god - have only faith in what you can measure. That's science.
If you don't mind me asking: why should you have faith in what you can measure? Is there an experiment to prove that empiricism is the best means of knowledge? Such an experiment would also be circular reasoning.
Obviously we're plaqued on all sides by a deficiency of our organic senses, yet we seek to understand beyond the range of our senses. Philosophers have wrestled with this conundrum for a while.
Measurement is the closest we're able to get to the truth. It's something that anyone can independently observe and achieve exactly the same result. It's not really the truth - we're never really able to achieve that - but it's at least something we know exists beyond ourselves and our fallible tendency to simply take what someone else says is true as the truth.
Yeah, it's something. I've got nothing against empiricism. Obviously I love the sciences, particularly the applied sciences.
But I find it amusing that the most self-evidently desirable things in life tend to resist measurement and empirical observation. I think that we need not be so avowed to that means as the all in all.
It's fine to have opinions that you hold close even if they're not entirely based in observable fact - for example, I understand that the notion of an afterlife brings a lot of people a sense of comfort that they may very much need in their life. The issue is when people take those opinions and apply them to something that extends far beyond their own life, such as this example of someone trying to push their opinion about god's influence on genetics onto the scientific community at large.
If he had any real data at all to base it on, it'd at least be something to think about, but it's nothing but his own interpretation of religious teachings that themselves aren't based on any data we know of or currently have access to. If it helps him to think that, he can go ahead - I'd still worry about the effects it'd inadvertently have on the required impartiality of his work, but without the data to back those worries up, I'd have no reason to doubt him - but what he did was a step too far.
What would you say about Hitler's explicit reference to Darwinism as a large part of the justification for his persecution of Jews and cripples? He based his opinions on real data.
He based his opinions on real data, but not all of the available real data. Darwinism and eugenics commonly point to certain 'bad genes" that they claim are present in the population, leading to such things as increased criminal activity and laziness. Real studies on these traits, however, find no familial correlation when accounting for upbringing; essentially, if you separate a child of a criminal from the life of a criminal, they're no more likely to become a criminal than anyone else. Hitler only focused on studies that fail to account for the socioeconomic effect that children of criminals tend to have fewer options, and are thus more likely to become criminals themselves. This is an example of one of the most common ways that scientific results can be corrupted - by the inclusion of only data that fits a preestablished opinion, and excluding data that doesn't.
Hitler also applied his cherry-picked data to certain scenarios, but not others. He claimed that he would create a future "utopia" by forcing subsequent generations to only carry desirable genes, but didn't talk at all about the fact that doing so creates a current dystopia, the horrors of which completely outweighing any potential benefit. Yes, selective breeding and/or culling of undesirable traits from the gene pool is an effective way to create a creature with certain characteristics - it's something we see often with breeding dogs and crops - but it's extremely unethical to apply this reasoning to humans, whose lives most would say have inherent worth outside of their genetics. It's also something we're starting to realize is unethical to do to animals - an example of how new data and new understanding of current data change our outlook on the world over time.
Ultimately, impartial assessment of all available data should never bring you to the same conclusion as Hitler.
That sounds like a lot of gray area. Hitler wasn't wrong about the premises of Darwinism that still stand today. This is straight out of Mein Kampf:
"In the struggle for daily bread all those who are weak and sickly or less determined succumb, while the struggle of the males for the female grants the right or opportunity to propagate only to the healthiest. And struggle is always a means for improving a species' health and power of resistance and, therefore, a cause of its higher evolution."
You say that it's unethical to apply this reasoning to humans. Why? If the Third Reich had succeeded in conquering Europe or even the world, would we then consider this ethical?
Co-discoverer of the DNA double helix Francis Crick agrees, unfortunately:
It's quite the stretch to imply that all Hitler did was apply the general concept of "survival of the fittest" to humanity. It's true that animals who are unable to find sufficient food or a mate before passing are unable to pass their genes to the next generation, but these changes are incredibly slight; even in the wild, most animals don't die because of their genes - they die because they were unluckily eaten, or fell sick, or any number of other potential issues. Evolutionary changes through natural selection generally only happen over millions of years due to this reason. To say that most people suffer due to some genetic factor, and that their failure to reproduce is having a meaningful, positive short-term impact on the human species is not just overlooking virtually every sociological data point - it's overlooking basic evolutionary theory as well; animals try to live in part because the more living different individuals, the better their species' likelihood to survive.
In the wild it's not uncommon for a gene that was heavily selected for under a certain environment to suddenly be ill-suited for a new environment. Mammoths were well suited to a cold ice-age climate, but died out relatively quickly when weather warmed up. It's humans who attribute evolution to "upward" momentum, when really it's simply lateral change over time, only becoming more suited to whatever arbitrary conditions the creature is currently subjected to, rather than improving any "objective" fitness.
In the end, genetic variety is the most effective way for a species to survive, because any number of different selective factors can suddenly make any particular trait essential for survival and reproduction. For example, baby seals with "ugly" coats ended up having an incredibly fortunate genetic variation when humans decided to massacre them for their fine furs, and now the species has survived in part due to something that otherwise would have been deemed by us to be a meaningless, or even undesirable, variation. Hitler's actions were not natural selection - they were, like the baby seals, a form of artificial selection; the arbitrary culling of genetic variations that were seen, by one man's opinion, as "inferior."
If Hitler and other eugenicists truly believed that human suffering were simply the natural form of evolution, they would have no need to take action into their own hands; if people who are genetically inferior are destined to die, then simply let them - no need for concentration camps and genocide. Their talking points are nothing more than half-baked justifications using data that's cherry-picked at best, and simply made-up at worst, to allow them to force evolution to take unnatural pathways. If they succeeded, it would simply bottleneck our genetic variation and make us less suited for any given environment - not more.
Tell that to the tens of millions killed in the early twentieth century as a result of these ideologies. It wasn't just the Nazi weirdos. Lots of prominent European and American scientists and politicians were advocating Social Darwinism. Francis Crick is still pushing it, and who knows more about the science than him?
Watson and Crick were fine scientists, but their discovery of the double helix structure was largely due to them looking at Rosalind Franklin's unpublished data and completely omitting her name from their announcement of its discovery. They were certainly not shining examples of scientific excellence or integrity, and I consider most geneticists I know to be well beyond their capabilities.
Which you ended by"The scientific approach to religion is to make no opinion on its existence,", which is one of the fallacy in your reasoning, you're reducing it to opinion, implying it can't be treated scientifically.
Inferring from that, at best you could say that it should be left alone until scientists could even apply the scientific approach. As in, we don't know, as you said. And that doesn't preclude faith, which isn't mutually exclusive with being scientific.
To be clear, what I read a lot in this thread, is being scientific should automatically infer you can't be religious, because you can't prove it's real. But it omits that you can't prove it isn't.
Granted, the mistake might from where it started, IE this post where the scientist was being very unscientific.
The only way the scientific approach could be used to measure the existence of a deity would be to measure the deity itself, at which point the measurement would only be a formality - its existence would already be verified. That's why it's the opposite of science. You can learn of a black hole before ever observing one by simply understanding the basic fundamentals of physics, but a deity would exist even outside of that. No amount of measuring nature would be able to prove or disprove something that exists outside of that. You still haven't made a single argument against that cornerstone of my argument. You can call it a fallacy all you want, but ultimately that's just a word you're using in place of actually arguing against my point. Faith is the belief that something is true without needing data. Science is the act of gathering data to form a belief. They are opposites.
Wrong, there are so many phenomenons that we couldn't measure, and could barely infer, and yet they ended up existing, sometimes surprising people a great deal in the process.
Sometimes we even have been wrong about things we could measure.
So yes, still a fallacy.
I understand that the logic mind doesn't like "It might or might not, for now we can't say", when it's about absolute, but that's how it is, while you really want to claim that it can't be, no matter what. Because you can't conceive god existing inside the laws of physics doesn't mean it's true.
For the end of your answer, I already explained that faith and logic are compatible, because you just say they are opposite doesn't make it so. And speaking of observable proof : the many religious scientists we have in this day and age, with much more of them being competent and well composed in their thoughts about religion than the one in the OP (or the many people in this post).
I'm curious what some of these phenomena are that you speak of. Also being wrong about the things we measure is exactly what science is for. That we know that it was wrong allows us to learn to do it correctly.
How many times do I need to tell you that I'm specifically saying that religion CAN exist? It CAN! I've never said nor implied that it's impossible, and I'm not saying we should believe it's impossible! I'm saying that it's just as bad to believe it's specifically real as it is to believe it's specifically fake when we can't measure it. To believe in religion is just as wrong as to believe in a lack of religion. We cannot know, so to believe anything about it is nothing more than an opinion and not a measurable fact. It's fine to have an opinion, but to think about something scientifically is to remove any preconceived notions about whatever you're studying and focus solely on what you can measure; since you can't measure religion, you can't think about it scientifically, which makes it the antithesis to science.
Yes, some things that are immeasurable end up being true - of course they do, but until they become measurable, they should not be assumed to be anything. If God shows up and we measure him, then he can be thought about scientifically, but until that point he can't, and he shouldn't be. Until we have something to measure, we should not assume any baseless ideas about its existence or lack thereof are true.
You say the logical mind has trouble saying "It might or it might not, for now we can't say" but that has been my entire point this entire time! To be religious is to say "Yes, it does exist," and to be atheist is to say "No, it does not exist," both of which are wrong. The scientific way to think about religion is to specifically not make any decision one way or another, so when a scientist says they're religious, that shows they've made a decision, which shows they've allowed unscientific biases to enter their daily life. Now, we're all human, and we all have biases, but when we start making scientific presentations centered around our biases, as this man did, it's incredibly problematic. Science and religion started out hand in hand, and most of our progress over the years has been due to our slow separation of the two.
That would apply if the scientists believing in their religion would claim to do so scientifically.
You're again saying that a scientific can't use faith in a case where he can't know, or it means that he will do so for the entirety of his work, but we both know that's not necessarily true. Because they choose to rely on opinion on this subject, does not necessarily mean that they do the same with their work ethic. (That would also mean doubting the work of a crushing majority of scientists, them being religious or atheist in most cases, unless agnosticism is much more widespread that last time I brushed the subject)
In essential, what I'm saying is because a scientist claims to be religious or atheist, thinking that their whole work should be doubted because of that, is a flawed argument.
PS : And because we can't measure it, and don't know if it's "can't measure yet" or "can't measure ever", we can't say that religion is the antithesis of science. Which means we can think about it scientifically, we just don't have the means to know if it's correct.
You're really desperate to find an argument I'm not making. Again, people can be religious. Scientists can be religious. However, if a scientist is religious they need to make very sure that their religion - that they believe in spite of no data, and is thus nothing more than an opinion - does not affect their science, which is required to be based on measurable data alone.
What this man did was make a scientific presentation based on his beliefs - his opinions - which were not based on measurements, and were thus unscientific. That was what crossed the line. I will always be wary of a religious scientist because I cannot determine whether their measurements are unaffected by the biases their religion gives them, but I can never truly dismiss their measurements, because I cannot be sure they are not legitimate. But when someone openly announces that they believe sin has caused a god to directly influence human genetics, and their claim is not based on any collected data, it shows that they absolutely have allowed their biases to affect the legitimacy of their work. In that instance, any past or present data that that person has collected will need to be re-measured by someone who has not shown to have allowed their biases to influence their work.
Something immeasurable is the antithesis to science, which is the act of measuring. If that thing later becomes measurable, it stops being the antithesis to science, because that immeasurability is no longer present. Insofar that we cannot know whether or not religion exists, it will continue to be something immeasurable, and will be antithetical to science. If someone wants to support both, they need to make absolutely sure that they are entirely compartmentalized, so that if the day comes that religion is either confirmed or denounced, it will not affect their work.
Ok, so considering that my original point, to which you answered, was that you don't need to compartmentalize to be able to experiment science and religion at the same time, what is your point ?
My point is that religious scientists are required to walk a very fine line to do both, because every interaction a human has with the world is a form of measurement.
Looking at a blue sky is a measurement, watching a child grow up is a measurement, smelling a flower is a measurement; these things are science, and for a religious scientist to be unbiased, they cannot allow any question of why or how they exist to be answered with "God." So, the question becomes: "What's left for a religious scientist to truly believe in, and not measure?" and the answer is that only the immeasurable can be left up to faith - the idea of an afterlife, the idea of a creator who kicked off the phenomenon of "reality" itself, and other such immeasurable things can be left up to faith, but nothing else.
Anything that can be answered by looking closer at existence itself cannot - in any way - be answered scientifically with anything other than real data. What this man did was show that he had allowed the measurable to be defined by the immeasurable in his work, and thus lost his legitimacy as a scientist.
Oh, I agree for the scientist in OP, dude lost his marbles or is coping hard on his cognitive dissonance, but my point was answering to the much simpler subject of "Scientists can't be religious or they're not proper scientists".
As to the very fine line religious scientists must walk, if we're honest, it's true of many things that make the life of a scientist, because it is measurable and can be approached scientifically, doesn't mean they will approach and measure it that way, humans are fallible, and they often do fail, but that's another subject.
You're absolutely right - ultimately, true scientific method is impossible for humans, since we all have biases, but striving for perfection is how we get as close as we can to it.
As you mentioned, scientific progress can be made even with biased data from people who have let religion and science intermingle, but as others have shown in this thread, it often leads to a slow process of chipping away at society's default answer of "God did it" little by little over time, which has significantly delayed scientific progress.
Even just 100 years ago this man likely wouldn't have lost his job for making a claim without data that sin has directly impacted human health, and I see the fact that it's now an unacceptable claim to be an indication that science as a whole is becoming less biased, in part due to its further separation from religion.