Big ideas.
Once a week.
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter.
Religious and supernatural belief linked with poor understanding of the physical world
A study published in Applied Cognitive Psychology suggests that believers struggle to understand the physical world.

The number of people who claim to have “No religious belief” is fast-growing in America and Europe, but the number expressing religious belief is growing faster. What’s more, the irreligious category includes fans of astrology, tarot reading or the paranormal. The tenacity of supernatural belief has prompted scientists to try understand its basis, and so far their answers have mostly implied a defect in believers: the religious have a bias in their visual attention; people with supernatural belief fall for bullshit statements. Now, in a study in Applied Cognitive Psychology, comes the suggestion that believers struggle to understand the physical world.
Marjaana Lindeman and Annika Svedholm-Häkkinen asked 258 Finnish participants to report their religious beliefs – that “there exists an all-powerful, all-knowing, loving God” – as well as beliefs in paranormal phenomena like telepathy and precognition. Then they completed a series of online tests and questionnaires tapping their demographics and psychological traits. Consistent with past research, Lindeman and Svedholm-Häkkinen found that believers were more likely to be women, intuitive thinkers, and less likely to think analytically.
The novel step was investigating the participants’ capabilities related to understanding the physical world. Although an aggregate of the participants’ school grades in physics and maths was unrelated to their supernatural beliefs, scores on another factor the researchers termed “physical capability” was inversely correlated with strength of belief in the supernatural.
“Physical capability” was based on a host of measures: the ability to correctly match rotated images together, to solve mechanical and physics-based problems, scientific knowledge, and the tendency to attribute thought to entities we don’t normally see as thinking, termed mentality (“henkinen” in Finnish – a greater tendency meant lower physical capability). I’ll talk more about this last measure later.
The authors interpreted their findings as saying that non-materialists focus more on thought, and less on the physical world. They added that “supernatural beliefs may thus reflect a broad, hyper-mentalistic cognitive phenotype, opposite to the hyper-mechanistic phenotype. Extreme forms of hyper-mechanistic phenotype can be found among individuals with Autism spectrum disorder.”
This kind of autism-related claim is a tempting thing to hang a headline on. We didn’t because I have some reservations with these conclusions.
First, the analogy is imperfect, as people can move between atheist and believer several times in their life, prompted by reflection, experience and conversation. This has no analogue in Autism Spectrum Disorder. In principle, there could exist a subset of believers whose cognitive phenotype traps them forever in supernatural beliefs, but that standard of evidence isn’t close to being met.
But my second and main concern is the fact that the physical capability factor included, and appears to be substantially driven by, the measure of mentality/henkinen.
Participants were asked to rate concepts like “consciousness” or “clock” as more or less mental, defined here as “anything that has some kind of spirit, or something which itself is mental”. When participants assigned any mentality to items like flowers, rocks, and wind, this contributed to their receiving a poorer “physical capability” factor, just as occurred when they mismatched two images on the mental rotation test.
But these aren’t the same sorts of things. Even putting aside that some botanists posit plant intelligence, thinking that rocks are mental is not a factual mistake, it’s a belief, just like a belief in God or astrology (and it’s a belief, lest we forget, which has a philosophical pedigree and that may be enjoying a resurgence.)
In an essay I began reading today by the poet Robert Bringhurst, he states – in my opinion without intending metaphor – that “if a tree falls in the forest, all the other trees are there to hear it.” Now, you may disagree with Bringhurst, but you can’t simply correct him.
A tendency to see mentality everywhere is less like a slip-up on a mechanics test, much more like a belief in God; indeed, much religious belief is grounded on the fact that there is a logos, holy spirit, or breath of life underpinning all existence.
Unsurprisingly, mentality correlated more strongly with paranormal (.60) and religious (.45) beliefs, than with mechanical ability (-.29 and -.24) or mental rotation (-.13, -.12). So when mentality – arguably a measure of belief rather than of physical understanding – is included as part of a physical capability factor that supposedly explains beliefs, well it feels like a bait-and-switch.
I should note that I contacted one of the authors, who told me that the “physical capability” / Supernatural belief association held in unpublished analyses that didn’t include mentality, although it did become weaker. So my criticism applies to the published version of the work that we have available, and further work published may escape this criticism entirely.

It’s important for us to understand the presence and absence of supernatural belief, and the idea of a continuum of focus from physical to mental is an intellectually arresting one. But personally, I would want to see more data before drawing conclusions as to the merit of that idea.
Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) is Contributing Writer at BPS Research Digest
This article was originally published on BPS Research Digest. Read the original article.
Weird science shows unseemly way beetles escape after being eaten
Certain water beetles can escape from frogs after being consumed.
R. attenuata escaping from a black-spotted pond frog.
- A Japanese scientist shows that some beetles can wiggle out of frog's butts after being eaten whole.
- The research suggests the beetle can get out in as little as 7 minutes.
- Most of the beetles swallowed in the experiment survived with no complications after being excreted.
In what is perhaps one of the weirdest experiments ever that comes from the category of "why did anyone need to know this?" scientists have proven that the Regimbartia attenuata beetle can climb out of a frog's butt after being eaten.
The research was carried out by Kobe University ecologist Shinji Sugiura. His team found that the majority of beetles swallowed by black-spotted pond frogs (Pelophylax nigromaculatus) used in their experiment managed to escape about 6 hours after and were perfectly fine.
"Here, I report active escape of the aquatic beetle R. attenuata from the vents of five frog species via the digestive tract," writes Sugiura in a new paper, adding "although adult beetles were easily eaten by frogs, 90 percent of swallowed beetles were excreted within six hours after being eaten and, surprisingly, were still alive."
One bug even got out in as little as 7 minutes.
Sugiura also tried putting wax on the legs of some of the beetles, preventing them from moving. These ones were not able to make it out alive, taking from 38 to 150 hours to be digested.
Naturally, as anyone would upon encountering such a story, you're wondering where's the video. Thankfully, the scientists recorded the proceedings:
The Regimbartia attenuata beetle can be found in the tropics, especially as pests in fish hatcheries. It's not the only kind of creature that can survive being swallowed. A recent study showed that snake eels are able to burrow out of the stomachs of fish using their sharp tails, only to become stuck, die, and be mummified in the gut cavity. Scientists are calling the beetle's ability the first documented "active prey escape." Usually, such travelers through the digestive tract have particular adaptations that make it possible for them to withstand extreme pH and lack of oxygen. The researchers think the beetle's trick is in inducing the frog to open a so-called "vent" controlled by the sphincter muscle.
"Individuals were always excreted head first from the frog vent, suggesting that R. attenuata stimulates the hind gut, urging the frog to defecate," explains Sugiura.
For more information, check out the study published in Current Biology.
The cost of world peace? It's much less than the price of war
The world's 10 most affected countries are spending up to 59% of their GDP on the effects of violence.
- Conflict and violence cost the world more than $14 trillion a year.
- That's the equivalent of $5 a day for every person on the planet.
- Research shows that peace brings prosperity, lower inflation and more jobs.
- Just a 2% reduction in conflict would free up as much money as the global aid budget.
- Report urges governments to improve peacefulness, especially amid COVID-19.
What is the price of peace?
Or put another way, how much better off would we all be in a world where armed conflict was avoided?
Around $14.4 trillion in 2019, according to the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) which crunched the numbers. That's about $5 a day for every person on the planet.
To give some context, 689 million people - more than 9% of the world's population - live on less than $1.90 a day, according to World Bank figures, underscoring the potential impact peace-building activities could have.
Just over 10% of global GDP is being spent on containing, preventing and dealing with the consequences of violence. As well as the 1.4 million violent deaths each year, conflict holds back economic development, causes instability, widens inequality and erodes human capital.
Putting a price tag on peace and violence helps us see the disproportionately high amounts spent on creating and containing violent acts compared to what is spent on building resilient, productive, and peaceful societies.
—Steve Killelea, founder and executive chairman, Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP)
The cost of violence
In a report titled "The Economic Value of Peace 2021", the IEP says that for every death from violent conflict, 40 times as many people are injured. The world's 10 most affected countries are spending up to 59% of their GDP on the effects of violence.
Grounds for hope
But the picture is not all bleak. The economic impact of violence fell for the second year in a row in 2019, as parts of the world became more peaceful.
The global cost dropped by $64 billion between 2018 and 2019, even though it was still $1.2 trillion higher than in 2012.
In five regions of the world the costs increased in 2019. The biggest jump was in Central America and the Caribbean, where a rising homicide rate pushed the cost up 8.3%.
Syria, with its ongoing civil war, suffered the greatest economic impact with almost 60% of its GDP lost to conflict in 2019. That was followed by Afghanistan (50%) and South Sudan (46%).
The report makes a direct link between peace and prosperity. It says that, since 2000, countries that have become more peaceful have averaged higher GDP growth than those which have become more violent.
"This differential is significant and represents a GDP per capita that is 30% larger when compounded over a 20-year period," the report says adding that peaceful countries also have substantially lower inflation and unemployment.
"Small improvements in peace can have substantial economic benefits," it adds. "For example, a 2% reduction in the global impact of violence is roughly equivalent to all overseas development aid in 2019."
Equally, the total value of foreign direct investment globally only offsets 10% of the economic impact of violence. Authoritarian regimes lost on average 11% of GDP to the costs of violence while in democracies the cost was just 4% of GDP.
And the gap has widened over time, with democracies reducing the cost of violence by almost 16% since 2007 while in authoritarian countries it has risen by 27% over the same period.
The report uses 18 economic indicators to evaluate the cost of violence. The top three are military spending (which was $5.9 trillion globally in 2019), the cost of internal security which makes up over a third of the total at $4.9 trillion and homicide.
Peace brings prosperity
The formula also contains a multiplier effect because as peace increases, money spent containing violence can instead be used on more productive activities which drive growth and generate higher monetary and social returns.
"Substantial economic improvements are linked to improvements in peace," says the report. "Therefore, government policies should be directed to improving peacefulness, especially in a COVID-19 environment where economic activity has been subdued."
The IEP says what it terms "positive peace" is even more beneficial than "negative peace" which is simply the absence of violence or the fear of violence. Positive peace involves fostering the attitudes, institutions & structures that create and sustain peaceful societies.
The foundations of a positively peaceful society, it says, are: a well functioning government, sound business environment, acceptance of the rights of others, good relations with neighbours, free flow of information, high levels of human capital, low levels of corruption and equitable distribution of resources.
The World Economic Forum's report Mobilizing the Private Sector in Peace and Reconciliation urged companies large and small to recognise their potential to work for peace quoting the former Goldman Sachs chair, the late Peter Sutherland, who said: "Business thrives where society thrives."
Reprinted with permission of the World Economic Forum. Read the original article.
The evolution of modern rainforests began with the dinosaur-killing asteroid
The lush biodiversity of South America's rainforests is rooted in one of the most cataclysmic events that ever struck Earth.
Velociraptor Dinosaur in the Rainforest
- One especially mysterious thing about the asteroid impact, which killed the dinosaurs, is how it transformed Earth's tropical rainforests.
- A recent study analyzed ancient fossils collected in modern-day Colombia to determine how tropical rainforests changed after the bolide impact.
- The results highlight how nature is able to recover from cataclysmic events, though it may take millions of years.
About 66 million years ago, a massive asteroid slammed into present-day Chicxulub, Mexico, triggering the extinction of dinosaurs. Scientists estimate the impact killed 75 percent of life on Earth. But what's remained more mysterious is how the event shaped the future of plant life, specifically tropical rainforests.
A new study published in Science explores how the so-called bolide impact at the end of the Cretaceous period paved the way for the evolution of our modern rainforests, the most diverse terrestrial ecosystems on Earth.
For the study, researchers analyzed thousands of samples of fossil pollen, leaves, and spores collected from various sites across Colombia. The researchers analyzed the samples to determine which types of plants were dominant, the diversity of plant life, and how insects interacted with plants.
All samples dated back to the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary, some 70 million to 56 million years ago. Back then, the region's climate was mostly humid and hot, as it is today. However, the composition and structure of forests were quite different before the impact, according to the study results.
Tropical jungle with river and sun beam and foggy in the gardenSASITHORN via Adobe Stock
For one, the region's rainforests used to have a roughly equal mix of angiosperms (shrubs and flowering trees) and plants like conifers and ferns. The rainforests also had a more open canopy structure, which allowed more light to reach the forest floor and meant that plants faced less competition for light.
What changed after the asteroid hit? The results suggest the impact and its aftermath led to a 45 percent decrease in plant diversity, a loss from which the region took about 6 million years to recover. But different plants came to replace the old ones, with an increasing proportion of flowering plants sprouting up over the millennia.
"A single historical accident changed the ecological and evolutionary trajectory of tropical rainforests," Carlos Jaramillo, study author and paleopalynologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama City, told Science News. "The forests that we have today are really the by-product of what happened 66 million years ago."
Today's rainforests are significantly more biodiverse than they were 66 million years ago. One potential reason is that the more densely packed canopy structure of the post-impact era increased competition among plants, "leading to the vertical complexity seen in modern rainforests," the researchers wrote.
The extinction of long-necked, leaf-eating dinosaurs probably helped maintain this closed-canopy structure. Also boosting biodiversity was ash from the impact, which effectively fertilized the soil by adding more phosphorus. This likely benefited flowering plants over the conifers and ferns of the pre-impact era.
In addition to unraveling some of the mysteries about the origins of South America's lush biodiversity, the findings highlight how, even though life finds a way to recover from catastrophe, it can take a long time.
New study determines how many mothers have lost a child by country
Global inequality takes many forms, including who has lost the most children
