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.
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:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dna-pioneer-james-watson-loses-honorary-titles-over-racist-comments-180971266/
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.
Thank you for sharing your perspective. I find it very interesting. You’ve given me some things to think about. 🙏🏼