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Celebrity atheist Richard Dawkins recently tweeted asking his followers’ thoughts on starting a cannibal diet.

Linking to an article about lab-grown flesh, the evolutionary biologist wrote: "I've long been looking forward to this," he wrote. "What if human meat is grown? Could we overcome our taboo against cannibalism?”

He went to say the scientific breakthrough will be an “interesting test case for the consequentialist morality versus ‘yuck reaction’ absolutism.”

The question of whether people would eat artificially created human flesh has been raised before.

(Image: GETTY)

(Image: GETTY)

Matti Wilks, of at the University of Queensland, Australia, conducted a study into how people feel about the issue.

And unsurprisingly, only a tiny proportion of people would be prepared to eat lab-grown human, dog, cat or horse meat.

She said: "I can't imagine that people who don't want to eat human meat now would suddenly feel motivated to eat human meat when produced via cellular agriculture.”

Mr Dawkins’ Twitter followers also didn’t seem to keen on the idea.

One wrote: “Dawkins. My pal. My buddy. Taboos are generally things we do NOT want to get over for many ethical and moral reasons.”

Another commented: “Personally, I wouldn’t consider eating the material that humans are made from as cannibalism although I suppose most people would. Whatever the DNA, to cease the annual suffering of billions of animals should be a primary goal.”

Just last year, scientists revealed they had created fake meat that “bleeds”.

The so-called “test tube” burgers were set to be the biggest gourmet trend of 2018 but have yet to make an impact on the food market.