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Russia fires a top geneticist who claimed people could live to 900 before sins caused Biblical flood

apnews.com 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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Bit of a tangent, but from what I can tell the language barrier (and cold war history) really doesn't do Russia any favours. Because so many Russians speak poor English, they're effectively cut off from the English speaking world.

Obviously, the Anglosphere has more than enough weird conspiracies, and there is some bleed through, but Russia has surprisingly popular stuff like Fomenko's New Chronology. For those wondering:

The new chronology is a pseudohistorical conspiracy theory proposed by Anatoly Fomenko who argues that events of antiquity generally attributed to the ancient civilizations of Rome, Greece and Egypt actually occurred during the Middle Ages, more than a thousand years later. The conspiracy theory further proposes that world history prior to AD 1600 has been widely falsified to suit the interests of a number of different conspirators including the Vatican, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Russian House of Romanov, all working to obscure the "true" history of the world centered around a global empire called the "Russian Horde"
- Phantom time conspiracies are my favorite kind of dumbass conspiracies.
- In the 80s and 90s people were so confused they believed in all kinds of scams. Charged water before the TV, gave money to financial pyramids, believed their kids dead in Afgan and Chechnya could be brought to life for a little donation, even japanese death cult Ayum Sinrikyo was filmed staying with Brejhnev and USSR got more of his followers than Japan itself. Some of these ceased to exist but some are still there, including that idiot, Dugin and others. One of the top programs on the TV in the 10s was an initially sceptical challenge show of self-named witches, mages, extrasensorically gifted people, that run for many seasons, and with time charlatans themselves started to use it as a kind of promotion to their services kek.
  
  From all of them, at least Fomenko is too absurd to most and genuinely funny in how he intertwines random historical events and his own marasm. But all of them should go to court to be honest. Their success is just a symptom of bigger problems, but they further enable people's idiotism and live in luxury extorting them.
  
  Charged water before the TV,
  
  Hah, i know at least one American preacher and one Dutch medium who did the same nonsense. Seems like it was quite the fad.
- Whoa, that's a fun one! Thanks for sharing! I love reading about these really different conspiracy theories.

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