Russia fires genetics institute head who claimed humans once lived for 900 years
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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.

  • prole@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    10 months ago

    I understand it just fine, it’s called cognitive dissonance. And you’re correct, I doubt their ability to do their job as a scientist.

    • eatthecake@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      From wikipedia:

      In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is the perception of contradictory information and the mental toll of it. Relevant items of information include a person’s actions, feelings, ideas, beliefs, values, and things in the environment. Cognitive dissonance is typically experienced as psychological stress when persons participate in an action that goes against one or more of those things.[1] According to this theory, when two actions or ideas are not psychologically consistent with each other, people do all in their power to change them until they become consistent.[1][2] The discomfort is triggered by the person’s belief clashing with new information perceived, wherein the individual tries to find a way to resolve the contradiction to reduce their discomfort.

      Religious scientists do not experience cognitive dissonance if they don’t view religion and science as incompatible, and apparently many of them don’t. Cognitive dissonance is not the same as hypocrisy. Some of those scientists may have experienced cognitive dissonance in the past but they have long since found a way of reconciling the scientific method with a belief in god.