14 | New Scientist | 8 June 2019BELIEF in the supernatural is
alive and kicking, even among
people who don’t believe in a
god. Research on atheists and
agnostics around the world
reveals that almost nobody
completely rejects irrational
beliefs such as life after death,
astrology or the existence of
a universal life force.
The UK-based Understanding
Unbelief project interviewed
thousands of self-identified
atheists and agnostics from
six countries: Brazil, China,
Denmark, Japan, the UK and the
US. It found that despite their
godlessness, a majority believe
in at least one supernatural
phenomenon or entity.
Among atheists in the UK,
for example, about 12 per cent
believe in reincarnation and
nearly 20 per cent in life after
death. All told, 71 per cent ofatheists hold one or more such
beliefs. For agnostics, the figure
is 92 per cent.
Globally, the most prevalent
supernatural beliefs are in
fate – that “significant life
events are meant to be” – and
that there are “underlying forces
of good and evil”. In the UK and
US, 20 to 30 per cent of atheists
believe in these, and around
40 per cent of agnostics.
The project also asked people
about karma, supernatural
beings and objects, and
people with mystical powers.
Even the least-believed
phenomenon, karma, is
endorsed by around 10 per cent
of atheists and 30 per cent ofthe general population in the UK.
Japanese atheists proved
the least susceptible to the
supernatural, scoring single-
digit percentages for most
beliefs and about 20 for fate
and good/evil. Chinese atheists
were the most susceptible,
with more than 30 per cent
professing a belief in astrology.
However, atheists and
agnostics in Western countries
do conform to type on one
measure: they are more likely to
endorse science. Two-thirds in
the UK agree that “the scientific
method is the only reliable path
to knowledge”, versus 46 per
cent of the general population.
“Humans are not rational,”
says Jonathan Lanman, an
anthropologist at Queen’s
University Belfast who
presented the work at a
conference at the Vatican.
He says the results may tell us
something about how our brains
work. “All those individual
supernatural beliefs might
have a distinct psychological
foundation, it’s not like there’s
a ‘religion’ module in the mind
that produces all of them.”
The findings are surprising,
says Marjaana Lindeman at the
University of Helsinki, Finland.
In her work, she discovered that
a majority of atheists reject all
supernatural beliefs.
“If you don’t believe in a
supernatural being like God,
it is quite difficult to believe
in other types of supernatural
phenomena,” she says. “It is
about thinking, reasoning,
knowledge and argument.”
The contradiction could
be down to people being very
sensitive to how questions
about belief are worded –
questions about fate or good
and evil could be interpreted in
a secular way, for example. ❚MARINE animals called sea squirts
can regenerate their entire bodies
from nothing but a tiny fragment
of a blood vessel. Their secret is a
special population of stem cells
floating in their blood.
The finding could help us
understand how regenerative
abilities evolved, or even help
doctors regenerate damaged or
lost tissues in our own bodies.
Sea squirts are small cylindrical
animals. They belong to a group
called the chordates, which also
includes all vertebrate animals –
those that have a backbone, such
as fish, birds and humans. Sea
squirts are our closest living
invertebrate relatives.
In 2007, researchers found
that one sea squirt, Botrylloides
leachii, can regrow its body from a
fragment of a blood vessel. “But no
one had done any in-depth studies
showing which cells give rise to
the new body,” says Susannah
Kassmer at the University of
California, Santa Barbara.
She and her colleagues studied
separated fragments of blood
vessels as they regenerated, and
found a population of cells that
expressed genes known to be
involved in this process.Most atheists
believe in the
supernatural
Sea creature
regrows entire body
Zoology PsychologyMichael Marshall Graham LawtonLIZ
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Destroying these cells halted
regeneration, while adding just
one restarted it (bioRxiv, doi.org/
c6j9). Kassmer calls them
“primordial blasts”. They are stem
cells, meaning they can grow into
a variety of different tissues.
Many other primitive
invertebrates, such as certain
jellyfish and flatworms, can
regenerate their bodies from
fragments. But vertebrates
cannot: at most they can regrow a
lost limb, as some salamanders do.
The most likely explanation,
says Kassmer, is that more
primitive animals used to have
this ability and then it somehow
got lost as vertebrates evolved.
“The biggest question in the
field is to figure this out and
understand how we might be able
to start regeneration in a human.”
In line with this, Kassmer
found that the primordial blasts
activated a gene called pou3.
This is similar to a vertebrate gene
called pou5 that is important in
pluripotent stem cells, which can
form any kind of cell. “It looked
like pou5 from humans and pou
in invertebrates might have
evolved from the same ancestral
gene,” says Kassmer. ❚71 %
of atheists hold at least
one supernatural belief