Philip Ball is an award-winning science writer who has penned over 30 books on a dizzying variety of subjects. Holding degrees in chemistry from Oxford and physics from the University of Bristol, Ball’s multidisciplinary background underpins his versatility. As a former editor at Nature for two decades and a regular contributor to a range of publications and broadcast outlets, Ball’s work exemplifies the rare combination of scientific depth and accessibility, cementing his reputation as a premier science communicator.

Tyler and Philip discuss how well scientists have stood up to power historically, the problematic pressures scientists feel within academia today, artificial wombs and the fertility crisis, the price of invisibility, the terrifying nature of outer space and Gothic cathedrals, the role Christianity played in the Scientific Revolution, what current myths may stick around forever, whether cells can be thought of as doing computation, the limitations of The Selfish Gene, whether the free energy principle can be usefully applied, the problem of microplastics gathering in testicles and other places, progress in science, his favorite science fiction, how to follow in his footsteps, and more.

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Recorded May 22nd, 2024

Read the full transcript

Thank you to Elazar Guttman for sponsoring this transcript “in tribute to Harsha Marti, who first introduced me to Tyler and to many other interesting and fun ideas and people.”

TYLER COWEN: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I’ll be chatting with Philip Ball. I think of Philip this way. We’ve had over 200 guests on Conversations with Tyler, and I think three of them, so far, have shown they are able to answer any question I might plausibly throw their way. Philip, I believe, is number four. He’s a scientist with degrees in chemistry and physics. He’s written about 30 books on different sciences. Both he and I have lost count.

He was an editor at Nature for about 20 years. His books cover such diverse topics as chemistry, physics, the history of experiments, social science, color, the elements, water, water in China, Chartres Cathedral, music, and more. But most notably, he has a new book out this year, a major work called How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology. Philip, welcome.

PHILIP BALL: Thank you, Tyler. Lovely to be here.

COWEN: What is the situation in history where scientists have most effectively stood up to power, not counting Jewish scientists, say, leaving Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union?

BALL: Gosh, now there’s a question to start with. Where they have most effectively stood up to power — this is a question that I looked at in a book (it must be about 10 years old now) which looked at the response of German physicists during the Nazi era to that regime. I’m afraid my conclusion was, the response was really not very impressive at all.

On the whole, the scientists acquiesced to what the regime wanted them to do. Very few of them were actively sympathetic to the Nazi party, but they mounted no real effective opposition whatsoever. I’m afraid that looking at that as a case study, really, made me realize that it’s actually very hard to find any time in history where scientists have actively mounted an effective opposition to that kind of imposition of some kind of ideology, or political power, or whatever. History doesn’t give us a very encouraging view of that.

That said, I think it’s fair to say, science is doing better these days. I think there’s a recognition that at an institutional level, science needs to be able to mobilize its resources when it’s threatened in this way. I think we’re starting to see that, certainly, with climate change. Scientists have come under fire a huge amount in that arena. I think there’s more institutional understanding of what to do about that. Scientists aren’t being so much left to their own devices to cope as best they can individually.

But I think that there’s this attitude that is still somewhat prevalent within science, that’s a bit like, “We’re above that.” This is exactly what some of the German physicists, particularly Werner Heisenberg, said during the Nazi regime, that science is somehow operating in a purer sphere, and that it’s removed from all the nastiness and the dirtiness that goes on in the political arena.

I think that that attitude hasn’t gone completely, but I think it needs to go. I think scientists need to get real, really, about the fact that they are working within a social and political context that they have to be able to work with, and to be able to — when the occasion demands it — take some control of, and not simply be pushed around by.

That, I think, is something that can only happen when there are institutional structures to allow it to happen, so that scientists are not left to their own individual devices and their own individual sense of morality to do something about it. I’m hoping that science will do better in the future than it’s done in the past.

COWEN: Which do you think are the power structures today that current scientists, say in the Anglo world, are most in thrall to? You wouldn’t say it’s the fossil fuel companies, right?

BALL: I absolutely wouldn’t.

COWEN: Times have changed, many people have spoken up, but on what issues is there still this problem? Where are the biggest biases now?

BALL: Well, absolutely, there are questions being asked and concerning situations arising with the relationship between science and what you might call commerce, really, and industry. Particularly, for example, in drug development in pharmaceutical companies, there have been instances where it seems like the science has been, either knowingly or unconsciously, distorted by the commercial interests involved.

It’s very clear that certainly pharmaceutical companies themselves tend to underreport any work that seems to conflict with the message they want to put out if they’re developing a drug. There’s underreporting of negative effects or of null effects. I think that the conflict between scientific research and the commercial interests relating to it is one area where there are real problems to be solved and questions to be asked.

I think that there’s also now an increasing problem simply within the structures of academia itself. This is the thing that perhaps worries me most about the way science is being steered or pushed these days. There are these tremendous pressures, absolutely unrealistic pressures on scientists — particularly young scientists starting their careers — to publish as much as they can.

I commonly hear the complaint from young scientists that they have no time to think anymore. You’ve just got to do. You’ve just got to put work out there. It has led, in recent times, to some quite high-profile cases of scientific misconduct where, basically, data has just been invented to create a publishable piece of work. I think that even when that’s not quite so obviously fraudulent, there are strong pressures on scientists to find the results that they are hoping to find. There’s a strong pressure for cognitive biases to creep in.

This is something that ought to be eminently fixable because there is no reason science has to be this way, that there have to be these tremendous pressures on scientists to constantly be producing results, constantly be chasing after what sometimes seems like the diminishing pools of funding.

There must be better ways of doing things than this, but we haven’t yet found them. I think that’s really one of the things that the scientific community, as a whole, has to address. How can we reverse these unrealistic pressures to produce in science?

COWEN: When it comes to policy, do you think current scientists are too safety conscious?

BALL: I wouldn’t say they are, actually. Well, in policy, now, that really depends on what you mean. For example, we can raise this question during the pandemic: Was there too much caution with things like the testing of vaccines or the various measures that were introduced? Of course, that is a question that became hugely politicized.

From what I saw, I think that it absolutely wasn’t the case with the vaccines. I think that the balance was exactly right there, that they were properly tested while still being accelerated to a degree that we absolutely needed. That was really a question of money more than anything else. There was so much money thrown at the problem that it was possible to do things all at once that normally would have been done in succession, that the drug companies could afford to take those risks because they had the financial backing.

In terms of things like that, in terms of the safety of pharmaceuticals, I think that at the moment, I see no cause for concern. There have been worries about whether scientists have been too cautious in their views about climate change. Some people say, “Surely, we knew 20 or 30 years ago that this was already a huge problem. Why weren’t scientists making much more noise about it then, as they are now, when things are getting to a really desperate stage?”

That was a process that I really saw unfold as an editor of Nature. We were handling a lot of the top climate papers at that time, when the worries of climate change were starting to be raised. I saw scientists going through an incredibly careful and cautious process of not wanting to be alarmist, not wanting to claim more than the data allowed them to say with confidence.

It felt to me as though that was right. It felt to me as though that is why today we can say with such confidence that climate change is real, and that we know something about the causes, and that it seems clear that they’re primarily anthropogenic because there was that very cautious, very careful checking-out of the grounds for saying that during those years.

It may well be the case that, because of that caution, the alarm wasn’t raised soon enough. It’s very hard to know how to manage that discrepancy, but I do feel that now we can be very confident in the conclusions that have been reached. It’s absolutely right that climate scientists, in particular, are really making strong statements and raising the alarm about what the future holds in this regard. I don’t think that there’s too much caution there.

COWEN: How far away are we from having artificial wombs that work?

BALL: Well, this has certainly been a question for almost 100 years now. This was something that some scientists were debating in the 1920s and 1930s. In fact, it was that debate that led to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which essentially talks about this in vitro gestation of whole populations. So that question has been around, and that research has been around for at least a hundred years now.

We’re getting closer. It’s an incredibly slow process, and we’re coming at it from both directions now. There are technologies now that are being used to keep alive babies who are born very, very prematurely that would previously have died. Then, from the other direction, it’s becoming possible to grow embryos for longer and longer periods outside the womb.

This isn’t done with human embryos because in just about all countries, that’s forbidden for longer than 14 days. But with animal embryos, it’s clear that they can be grown for much longer than that, almost to the point of full gestation, actually — certainly up until about halfway through, where you’ve really got something like a fetus. We have the technologies that are getting there from these two directions.

I think the broader question is, why would we need a technology like that to do the whole job? Certainly, for humans, it’s not clear that there’s a call for it. It’s not clear that there’s any real social driver for that sort of technology.

COWEN: There is a big fertility crisis, right?

BALL: Oh, absolutely. Well, there is —

COWEN: That’s the call for it, right? We need more people in the future at some point.

BALL: [laughs] If we need more people in future, I think this is one of those problems like many problems: There is a social and economic problem that is not going to be solved by technology. The idea that if — and it’s questionable if this really is the case — if there is the case of declining fertility, it’s not at all obvious that what we therefore need is more children made by artificial means.

Not only because we have no means of doing that at the moment, not only because we don’t understand all of the ethical and safety issues associated with a potential technology like that, but also because, if there is a decline in fertility, in fertility rates, in the number of children being born in some countries, that isn’t because it’s impossible. That is because of social changes that are the things that we need to be looking at if we’re concerned about a problem like that.

It’s not clear to me that it actually is a problem at the moment. The problem of population growth is the problem that we still face. I’m not sure that we are going to see artificial wombs developed in the near future for human reproduction because I don’t think that there’s a clear need for them.

COWEN: But isn’t that a case of scientists, maybe yourself included, being too cautious? You understand asymptotes. A smaller population would be fine five years from now, but if we just keep on shrinking — it seems virtually every country except Israel and parts of Africa have gone below replacement rates, often considerably below. South Korea is at 0.7. We can’t just have things shrink, shrink, shrink. The ethical and danger implications of that are quite extreme, especially for countries with debt or a lot of retirees.

BALL: Well, I think, as you say, one of the issues that raises is more about the change in demographics, where you have an increasingly aging population. That’s also because we are living longer in a lot of countries. That certainly needs to be talked about, and we need to think about what the answer to that is. I’m not sure [laughs] the answer to that is simply to have more children.

I’m no expert in demographics, but it’s been predicted by demographers for a long time that, actually, we were going to go, and are going to go, through a population hump, that it’s going to peak at maybe something like nine billion or so. Then it’s predicted to decrease to something more like perhaps six billion, which I think would be a fantastic thing because that is one of the big challenges that we have been facing: the growth in population, the demands that creates for food production, for energy, for economic growth generally.

I don’t see any reason to believe that a decline from that — if we reach that figure of nine billion — that a decline from that is going to be inherently bad in itself. I certainly don’t think that, at this point, there is any reason for anyone to fear that somehow the population is going to shrink to nothing. I don’t think anyone feels that’s the case.

If there are concerns of that sort to be raised, then what we need to be asking is, what is behind this decline in fertility? It’s not fertility in the technical sense, it’s not infertility. There are issues there to some degree, but that doesn’t seem to be causing the decline in birth rate. It seems to be the choices that people are making. So, why are they making those choices? That’s what we really need to understand.

COWEN: It could simply be for a lot of people, kids aren’t that fun, and we’re just on that asymptote forever because that won’t change. Many other things have become more fun, like the internet or playing with AI. Kids have become a bit more fun. Maybe it’s safer to raise them, but the basic joys are more or less constant, so then we’re stuck again.

BALL: In my experience, kids are a lot of fun, but I think it’s really important that not everyone is made to feel as though they ought to feel that way. Absolutely, I think if people choose to not have children, then I think that should be . . . There’s often a problem, actually, that if people make that choice, it becomes stigmatized. It becomes, “What is your problem with children?”

I think that’s a terrible attitude to take. I think it absolutely has to be a matter of personal choice. There are all sorts of reasons why this seems to be happening. For some people, it may be an economic one. Kids cost a lot of money, and not everyone can afford that.

COWEN: But it’s the richer societies where birth rates fall. In Niger, you have seven kids to a family. The Nordics, which have free childcare, all sorts of benefits from others, they’re often between 1 and 1.5. They do many things right. They’re very nice places. Pretty easy to raise kids there, and they’re going to disappear.

BALL: I don’t know that they’re going to disappear. I think it’s important to understand why it is those trends are happening, and to have some sorts of projections of how they might ultimately play out.

My understanding is, certainly, that in some Asian countries where birth rates are falling — and I think this may be true, actually, in some African countries as well — there seems to be some connection to the increasing empowerment of women, which has to be a good and important thing. Particularly, in some Asian countries, women are increasingly thinking, “Why should I follow the traditional route of getting married young and raising a family rather than having a career?”

Also, as women in those countries get greater access to education, they become a bit more discerning about what they’re going to accept and what they’re going to look for in a partner, and what they’re not. I think that too has to be a good thing. If that’s the case, if women are finding, “Actually, you know what? I would rather not start a family young, get married young. I would rather actually have a career. I would rather have my own independence.”

It seems to me that not only is that a positive thing in itself, but that is something we need to understand — why are the women faced with making that choice? Why are they faced with the choice of either a career or a conventional family life? Again, these seem to me to be social questions that we need to ask that don’t have, and shouldn’t have, a technological solution.

COWEN: Why isn’t the human body more symmetric? My heart’s on my left side, right?

BALL: It’s pretty symmetric. We do have this bilateral symmetry, but it’s not perfectly so. The question is why we have these small asymmetries. I may be wrong, but I’m not sure that’s something to which we have a clear answer. We have some understanding now, and it’s a really interesting understanding of how developmentally that happens, how that symmetry is broken in the body.

It’s really fascinating to see how that happens. When you start to think about it, it’s not obvious why it should happen at all. If we start from this symmetrical bundle of cells, how does that symmetry get broken in the first place to create any sort of structure? We have some understanding of how it happens developmentally, but whether there’s an adaptive benefit or a physiological benefit to these small asymmetries that appear internally in the body, I’m really not sure. It may just, in some cases, be an evolutionary accident.

COWEN: Now, you’ve written a book on invisibility. After I read your book, I was wondering, how much would it be worth today to be . . . Wells’s The Invisible Man. Say you’re an able-bodied 30-year-old man in the United States or in the UK, and you could turn invisible at will and then be seen again. They don’t capture you or imprison you to be studied for science. How much is that worth? You can go around and steal things, or see people naked, or what is it? [laughs] What’s the equilibrium?

BALL: Yes, exactly. Tyler, it’s so interesting that those are the two things you alight on. “Hey, you could do those things.” Because that really is the message of H.G. Wells’s book. It’s a message that he took from an ancient myth that first crops up in Plato’s Republic, a myth of a chap called Gyges, who is a shepherd who finds a ring of invisibility.

He’s just going about his job as a shepherd, and then he comes across this ring, and what does he do? The first thing he does is, he gets to go on the expedition — I guess it’s taking the taxes or something to the king. And he uses the ring to kill the king, seduce the queen, and become a ruler, a tyrant, in fact, of the population. The message that Plato wanted us to get from that story, and that H.G. Wells wanted us to get when he rewrote it as The Invisible Man, is, invisibility corrupts.

Invisibility there is a metaphor for lack of responsibility. When you can evade responsibility for your actions, which is exactly what you’re talking about we could do if we had this ring of invisibility — that is a corrupting capability to have. It seems almost inevitable that that is what happens.

In fact, it’s what we see happening all the time now, particularly on the internet, where that anonymity — effectively, that invisibility — that the internet provides, that social media can provide to some people, or they think it provides anyway. We see that that encourages them to do things and to say things that they would never do to someone in person. Sometimes it’s even called the Gyges effect.

These stories that we have told traditionally about invisibility seem to have this moral conclusion that, actually, invisibility sounds like it would be a wonderful superpower, but we have to really beware of that temptation because it’s a very strong corrupting influence. Of course, that’s what happened in The Lord of the Rings. That was entirely the metaphor of the Rings of Power there.

I would say, in military terms, invisibility would probably be worth enormous amounts. The military, in particular, is investing in research that is trying to find materials and so forth that can confer some degree of invisibility, whether it’s to radar or to infrared or whatever. But I think the message from history and from mythology is that invisibility is a power to be very wary of.

COWEN: Do you think you could turn it into a hundred million dollars, or a billion dollars, or how much?

BALL: I think you could name your price if you had a technology.

COWEN: No, only you. You’re invisible. No one else can do it.

BALL: [laughs] All right.

COWEN: Lift wallets from people’s pockets, whatever you want.

BALL: You see, having written that book and having looked into the history of it, I would like to feel that if someone came along and said, “Here’s a ring of invisibility. It’s all yours, and just yours. Do what you want with it.” I would like to think that I would be like Gandalf, and I would say, “No, take it away. Don’t tempt me with it because I know where that stuff leads.”

If one had it, then, of course, the sky’s the limit. You could take what you liked, and that’s the worry. For me, [laughs] I would love to feel that I would resist that temptation.

COWEN: Why is it that we, as evolved humans, find outer space beautiful? Is that a coincidence? Or is there a reason why it worked out that way?

BALL: I certainly find it beautiful. I find it beautiful to see it from Earth. Actually, I find space itself — the thought of space itself — terrifying. I feel that’s really how we should see it. In this era of space travel, I think we are seeing that that’s the case. I was really struck by how, when William Shatner was taken by Jeff Bezos on one of these flights on the — is it called Blue Origin? The flight?

COWEN: I think so.

BALL: Yes. He took Shatner up there, Shatner, of course, being Captain Kirk of Star Trek. Shatner came back and said he felt this profound emptiness, really, loneliness, terrifying loneliness. He felt that he was looking at death when he looked out into space, which is absolutely not what you expect to hear from Captain Kirk. I think that’s right, the right way to see it.

Space, in reality — when we’re out there, when people are out there, it’s constantly trying to kill us in all sorts of ways. With radiation, obviously; it’s incredibly cold; it’s a vacuum. So, it’s a deathly place. I think that the space looks beautiful to us from Earth, from this place of safety. It’s because it’s a place of safety that actually, I think space reminds us of how precious — or should remind us of how precious this place is, this place where we have the privilege of being able to look out onto the stars from somewhere that gives us everything we need.

From that perspective, it is awe inspiring. I guess, when I look out on a night like that, when I’m away from London, away from the light pollution, that what I feel is awe in the old sense, in the 19th-century sense of the sublime, this slightly terrified awe of what is out there, of our — I wouldn’t say our insignificance, but our small part in something that is just so vast.

When you really think about what all these pinpricks of light represent, certainly, if you look through a telescope, some of them being entire galaxies, and we have no idea. We really have no idea how far that goes out to. There’s a beauty to it, but it’s a terrifying beauty.

COWEN: Speaking of terrifying, what’s the hidden, or you could say Straussian, reading of the Chartres Cathedral in France?

BALL: Ah, well, the way I presented it in my book — I’ve called my book Universe of Stone, and the idea behind that title was that, in some sense, the Gothic cathedrals — and Chartres is certainly my favorite; it’s one of the earliest of the true Gothic cathedrals and one of the most beautiful and spectacular. In some sense, what they represented was a model of the universe, a kind of medieval cosmology, because at that time — and in fact, as it happened, particularly in the Cathedral School of Chartres, there was a resurgence of interest in the philosophy of Plato.

Plato had this idea that the whole of the cosmos was built on principles of a cosmic harmony that involved geometric ratios between things. The Gothic cathedrals themselves are planned according to ideal ratios, simple ratios of height and width and so on, of proportion, ratios of 1:2 and 2:3.

That design and that wish to convey, somehow, this sense of order and cosmic harmony — that’s, I think, what we respond to even today in those places, even though we, of course, can’t see them through medieval eyes. We’re used to seeing, now, gigantic constructions of all sorts. But nevertheless, for me, the Gothic cathedrals still retain something that modern architecture hasn’t managed to capture, in the sense of conveying that sense of harmony and order.

That’s absolutely what the Gothic cathedrals were aiming to do. We know that the people who were designing them — we would now think of them as the architects — were drawing on those Platonic ideas of harmony and trying to express them explicitly in what they did.

It starts to sound like we’re getting into Dan Brown territory here. People have claimed — and I think it’s probably claimed in Dan Brown’s novels — that there are all sorts of hidden codes and so on within the Gothic cathedrals. But I think, actually, the real meaning is there in plain sight because we can see that they are built according to these principles of proportion that we know were important to the theologians and to the architects who worked for them.

COWEN: It’s harmony plus demons, right? I take the message of the cathedral to be, demons rule even the heavens.

BALL: You mean because you have these gargoyles?

COWEN: It’s a scary place to go. It’s like Shatner in outer space. I’m in the cathedral thinking, “My goodness, this is terrifying.”

BALL: That’s exactly what Napoleon is said to have said, because the French Republic was famously going to get rid of all this religious nonsense. It was going to be built on principles of reason and so on. Napoleon said that in the Gothic cathedrals, even an atheist will feel uncertain of themselves because of that. I think that’s quite right. I think that’s absolutely right. I’m an atheist, and I certainly had that feeling inside Chartres.

Again, there is something about that terrifying awe, but I think there, it’s also a kind of an awe just at the sheer feat of engineering that they represent. That was done, obviously, by hand with very primitive machinery for lifting and so on. But there was no mechanization there, and so the sheer fact that these places were built, and that they are still standing, so many of them, after a thousand years is truly extraordinary.

I thought you might be talking about the fact that you do also, literally, in some of these cathedrals, have the demons around you. You have the gargoyles up there looking down at you. I think that, to some extent, we can see this in what was actually depicted. To some extent, there’s a playfulness there that I think people have always had, that the stonemasons had. There’s a delight that they had in creating these grotesque and often quite playful carvings high up there, out of sight, perhaps, of the priests, where they were free to let their imagination have free rein.

COWEN: Why is so much late medieval culture — science, you could say music, tapestry work — concentrated in northern France? What was special about that region at the time?

BALL: The early Gothic era certainly did start in northern France. It’s this region called the Île-de-France. I suppose, it’s within — I can’t remember quite what distance it’s typically said to be — but I think within about a 50-mile radius of Paris. Absolutely, that was the center of learning at that time.

Britain, I have to say, England was very much an intellectual backwater at that time. France was certainly one of the regions where there was this resurgence of learning. There was some of it happening in Germany as well, but France was a more unified country, and it had been so to some extent ever since the Emperor Charlemagne in the ninth century. It had had this stability, and Charlemagne, in fact, himself famously wanted to bring about a resurgence of learning. It only really kicked off around the 11th century. The 11th to 12th centuries were often called the Medieval Renaissance.

But I have to say that a lot of that learning was imported, was brought from the Islamic countries, from Spain, which was occupied by what were then called the Moors. In the centuries preceding that era was the era of the golden age of learning in the Islamic nations. The Islamic scholars translated a lot of the works of the ancient Greeks — Aristotle and Plato and many others — into Arabic.

The European scholars — many of them from France, but also from Germany and from Britain — were coming down to Spain to get hold of those works, and to translate them, to learn Arabic, and to translate them from Arabic to Latin. That was really what created this influx of learning into Western Europe at that time. It was coming from translations of Arabic works.

COWEN: If we think of the 17th-century Scientific Revolution in England, putting aside the longer-term role of the church in preserving manuscripts and the like, do you view Christianity as being a net positive or net negative behind that development?

BALL: I guess I feel that’s a question that’s hard to see what the counterfactuals would be, because history is history. [laughs] To all of the scientists, certainly, in the 17th century — the time that’s often called the Scientific Revolution — Christianity was just a given, the fact that God existed, and no one, really, at that time, questioned that.

They had different ways of understanding that, and of expressing that, but for those scholars, that was just a given, so that informed everything that they were doing. For some people — for example, the Anglo-Irish scientist, as we now see him, Robert Boyle in the 17th century — it was a Christian mission to try to find out all that we could about God’s creation, about this world that God had created.

That was a duty, a Christian duty, to be curious, to be interested in everything in nature. Boyle would make these long lists, this random list of things he wanted to find out about, things he wanted to discover. It was really the first golden age of curiosity, that time. To my mind, that’s a better way of looking at it than calling it the Scientific Revolution. It was the age when curiosity was liberated.

In earlier times, in medieval times, there was often a sense expressed by some theologians that curiosity was something to be, at best, cautious of, and at worst, very suspicious of, or even condemning of, because they saw it as prying into things that it was not humankind’s preserve to ask about.

Whereas by the 17th century, really, through the process of the Renaissance, and the humanism, and the resurgence of learning, it became acceptable to have this almost universal curiosity about the world. And that’s absolutely something that we see in people like Boyle and Newton, and the fellows of the Royal Society in London, but also of other scientific societies that started elsewhere in Europe.

As I say, underpinning all of that was a profound religious faith. Sometimes that was a motivation for that curiosity, and sometimes it was — in the case of Isaac Newton, for example — the framework within which he was developing his theory of gravitation. The picture that he presented of the planets revolving around the sun and the moon revolving around the earth because of gravitational force, being held there by gravity — that was all very well, but the question was, “Well, how did that get started? What got them moving in the first place?”

We understand now that once they are moving, they’ll continue to do so. For Newton, that wasn’t really a question at all because, of course, God did it. It was God’s creation. It gave a coherence, really, to the picture that he was looking for.

You can certainly find, of course, the obvious counterexample in the persecution of Galileo, which is often misrepresented. Galileo was, to some extent, the architect of his own misfortune, which is in no way to excuse the kind of treatment that he got from the Catholic Church. Absolutely, there were tensions between this new understanding, this new way of thinking about the world and the old idea, according to some, that you shouldn’t ask too much or that, well, it was just God that did it all.

There were tensions there, but I don’t know that we need put it as weighing in the balance, the pros and the cons. It was simply how history was. It was simply how ideas evolved. For most of the history of science, religion has been there as the backdrop, whether it’s Islam or whether it’s Christianity or whether it’s Judaism. It’s been there, and science developed. I think this idea that there was somehow a big tension between science and religion, in many ways, it’s a modern construct. It’s something that really only started to be emphasized in the late 19th century for various polemical reasons. I don’t think it is something that we can really see throughout the history of science.

COWEN: Now, you’ve written a book about myths. Do you think there are myths from the last 10 or 20 years that will stick? Say the way Robinson Crusoe is still around as a story, or Sherlock Holmes is still around. What would those myths be? Or have we stopped producing them?

BALL: No, I’m sure we haven’t stopped producing them. My book about myths was actually about what I call the modern myths, and it’s exactly those stories. I begin with the earliest one that I look at from early modern times, Robinson Crusoe, and I bring it right through. It wasn’t difficult to identify the candidates for that status. They were things like Frankenstein, Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde, Sherlock Holmes. The latest myth I look at in that book is Batman. That’s 100 years old now. Actually, it’s amazing to think that that’s the case, but it virtually is.

I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that we have stopped this process of inventing modern myths, but I feel that it probably takes at least 50 years before some new narrative clearly acquires that mythic status. I think that one of them that is now emerging is the zombie myth.

The idea of zombies is an old one. It started to become popularized in western culture in the 1930s, but I think it was really crystallized in the B movie horror films of the 1960s, particularly the George Romero films. I think that we now all have a sense that the zombie myth is something about the zombie apocalypse. It’s not individual zombies; it’s humanity overrun by a horde of mindless zombies. That’s the basis of the myth.

We have that now, and I think it’s inevitable that we’re going to continue to develop myths. What I argue in that book is that these narratives acquire mythic status because they satisfy some need in us to explore social anxieties in stories in a way that allows us to look at them and explore them and think about them. Myths are tools for thinking with. They don’t have a moral; they don’t have a clear conclusion. They allow us to explore those anxieties. Sadly, there will always be new anxieties that arise.

We already have to some extent a mythology of AI. That’s absolutely going to be a nexus around which certain mythologies are going to start growing. That’s because it’s a new technology. It’s an old idea, but now that it’s becoming a reality, those anxieties are really, really strong and with us and prevalent. So, we’re going to need myths to explore them.

One thing I feel about that is that there are pros and cons to that, because the myth that we have around AI — and it’s one that’s being fed at the moment, sometimes, by tech companies even — is of the AI apocalypse, the AI takeover: that suddenly AI becomes super intelligent and it has no need for us, and it wipes out humanity. That, I think, is a very convenient myth for AI companies because it’s something that’s out there in the indefinite future, and they can say, “Oh, sure, we’re worrying about that, and we’re taking care of that.”

Whereas the real dangers and risks and things to be worried about with AI are much more mundane things that are here and now: deep fakes, the production of misinformation, the trivial but sometimes important misuses of AI because we attribute it too much power. Those are the things that we should really be concerned about now. It could be that the myths that we develop get in the way of the things we should really be worrying about in the here and now.

COWEN: Let’s turn now to your new book again, How Life Works, A User’s Guide to the New Biology, which I enjoyed very much and learned a great deal from. A simple question: Let’s say an octopus loses an arm, and then the arm can grow back. What exactly in the octopus knows to grow the arm back and where to have that growth stop? What’s regulating this response? Because if I lose an arm, that doesn’t grow back. I don’t have that regulator.

BALL: This is an extremely active area of current research. My knowledge of octopus anatomy is not sufficient to know whether octopuses can do that. I suspect they can’t, but I may be wrong.

Some creatures can, and certainly salamanders can, axolotls can. They can regrow limbs that they have lost. Some complex creatures can do this, and we don’t know exactly what enables them to do that, other than that in order to do that, you will have to have a reserve of something like stem cells, something that maintains the stem cell–like state, like the cells that we grew from in the early embryo. Those are stem cells, cells that, in the early embryo, are able to grow into any tissue type in the body.

In our bodies we have what are called adult stem cells, which can produce a limited number of tissue types. We have them, for example, in our bone marrow. They continually produce the different types of cells in our blood, but they can’t produce muscle cells or brain cells or something.

Whereas in creatures that can regenerate their limbs, they seem to have a kind of stem cell that can regrow into all the tissue types that that limb requires. The question of how that is done in a body that is already grown, rather than an embryo where everything is growing and communicating and finding its way together — that is a profound one that I think we don’t yet fully know the answer to.

It’s an area of intense research at the moment, not least because it raises that prospect of regenerative medicine, perhaps even in humans. If we understood how that is possible in a complex creature like an axolotl, might it not be possible to develop some kind of capability like that in humans? We don’t know the answer to that, but it’s not obviously the case that we couldn’t.

COWEN: Arguably, the axolotl cells are doing computational work. Is that one way to put it?

BALL: That could be one way to put it. Certainly, it’s got to be a collaborative process, that the cells will have to be communicating with each other and communicating with other cells in at least some part of the rest of the body in order to figure out, literally, where they are and what they have to become as a result of that. That is a kind of computation of one cell communicating with those around it, and so forth.

That could be one way of thinking about it, but we don’t know the language, really, of that computation, other than that we know that cells communicate with one another in various ways. They can exchange chemical signals just as they do in our synapses. In our brains, they can exchange mechanical signals so that if you tug on the membrane of a cell, that can induce the cell to do something or to grow or develop in a certain way that it wouldn’t have done otherwise.

They also communicate electrically. Not just neurons, but all cell types pretty much in the human body have the potential to communicate with one another, to sense the electric signals that other cells can produce, and to respond to those. So, we know the languages that cells use, but we don’t really understand the kinds of conversations that they’re having in a creature like an axolotl to produce a fully formed, fully developed replacement limb.

COWEN: Do you think that my cells are doing computational work in a way that, though I cannot regrow a limb, in some manner makes me smarter?

BALL: Well, it’s an argument, really. Sometimes it’s a raging argument in neuroscience, about whether we should think of the brain as a kind of computer, whether it’s doing computation or not. No one agrees about this. I’m fairly agnostic on this, except that I have a feeling that it’s not necessarily the most useful way to think about what’s going on during cognition, to think of it as being just like the kind of computation that’s going on in the electronic circuits of our laptops.

But you can see why that analogy is made, because the neurons in our brains and other cell types are wired into networks that are clearly sending electrical pulses to one another and triggering each other to do likewise. It looks very much like, in some ways, the exchange of electrical pulses between transistors on silicon chips. But there are differences in that process as well, sometimes profound differences.

It’s really not clear at the moment whether there is any straightforward or even any translation at all between the kind of computation that is done by silicon circuits and the kind of cognitive processing that is being done by neurons.

COWEN: But you are an atheist. Doesn’t it tautologically have to be computation? No one ever said it had to be like a computer like I have on my desk, but it’s in some manner, in the Turing sense, a computation.

BALL: Well, that’s the thing. It really depends on the context you’re talking about. There are people, there are physicists who say, “Well, in some sense, we can think of everything that happens in the universe as a kind of computation of particles interacting with one another and responding to one another.” Certainly, we can develop a quantum mechanical description of what’s going on in terms of the exchange of bits of quantum information between particles. So that’s one way of looking at it.

If we mean computation in that sense of simply interactions between particles, then sure, I think at the most fundamental level, that seems to be what we’re going to find. Whether that means we can usefully use computational concepts to try to understand brain circuitry is another matter entirely.

In some ways, we talk about them in similar terms. We talk about memory and data storage and so on. I think there are absolutely analogies to be had there, but whether there are strict, formal parallels between those two processes, I think, is something that is yet to be decided. And perhaps more importantly, it’s yet to be decided whether that will be a useful way to think about those two processes, whether it will help neuroscientists formulate theories and understanding of how the brain works. I think that’s still an open question.

COWEN: Tell us why you reject Richard Dawkins’s vision of The Selfish Gene, as his book was titled.

BALL: Okay, I think it’s actually not quite as straightforward as rejecting it. When I was writing my book, I wanted to think — clearly, this has been an extremely productive metaphor and way of portraying, certainly, what goes on in evolutionary biology. So, I don’t think it would be fair or proper to simply say, “Well, that’s nonsense. It’s time to get rid of that.”

In what way has it been useful? How to put it in the right container, I suppose. The way I saw it is this. I’m going to set aside the question of selfishness, which I’ll come back to in a minute — whether that’s a good metaphor — but the idea that we can essentially reduce everything in biology to what the genes are doing.

That is a picture that has been very productive to evolutionary geneticists to understand how particular mutations of genes — alleles, as they’re called, different variations of a given gene — how they spread in a population. If you get an allele arise that — a mutation of a gene that conveys some kind of property on the organism that gives it an adaptive advantage, an advantage in competition with all the others, then that allele is likely to spread because that organism will have more offspring, and so on. This is standard neo-Darwinian theory, and all of that is perfectly valid.

Within that picture, a gene-centered view of that process of how alleles spread has been useful in that arena. The problem I have is when that comes to be seen as the basis for understanding everything that life is. Because the problem with that is that there is no life in that picture. It’s as simple as that. I think it’s really interesting what happens there, that the genes themselves in that picture are portrayed as little agents. Richard Dawkins more or less explicitly does that.

Of course, he’s not saying they have any purposes or any goals or intentions, or any life in reality, but that is how they are portrayed, as though they are little organisms competing with one another with goals, their goal being to replicate as much as possible. Even the fact that they can replicate — they’re portrayed as being able to replicate. No gene replicates. Genes are replicated. They are replicated within cells by cells. That’s an important distinction if we’re going to think about how life works, but it may not be an important distinction to make in the context of evolutionary genetics.

That’s really where I want to locate that picture of that gene-centric view, that it’s a particular model. The selfish-gene metaphor is a metaphor for that particular model for use within evolutionary genetics. It does not speak about what genes are in a biochemical sense or what they are in a developmental sense. In fact, it seems fairly clear that when we’re talking about genes in terms of how an organism develops and what the role this particular bit of the DNA seems to play in that development, that’s a rather different notion of a gene to this notion of the selfish gene in a pool of different alleles replicating.

The evolutionary gene and the developmental gene aren’t necessarily the same thing. Certainly, when we try to think about a gene in molecular terms, it’s become very fuzzy. More and more fuzzy the more we’ve looked into what genomes really are and what they really do, what our DNA does, and what the different sequences of DNA do.

We find that what we think of as genes seems to overlap. There are some things that we call pseudogenes that maybe once were genes and aren’t any longer, but maybe they can come back as genes. There are regions outside the parts that we think of as genes that actually seem to have some important role in development. So, the whole picture becomes very fuzzy.

Also, within that picture, I think the question of selfishness is important because the selfishness refers to the tendency of a particular gene variant, an allele, to spread at the expense of other variants of that particular gene. That’s very different from the notion of a set of genes in a genome working together to make an organism. They have to work together to make an organism, so they’re not competing with each other. The gene that produces one enzyme isn’t competing with a gene that produces some other enzyme. They have to work together, so they’re cooperative.

I think that that selfish metaphor isn’t saying anything about what genes do biochemically. It’s talking about that particular model.

COWEN: But say I want to defend the gene-centered view. It seems to me that CRISPR actually works. It’s not counteracted by some complex set of macro interactions. If I look at genetically modified foods — corn, rice — and we apply genetic modification, it’s quite predictable what will result. We’re just not surprised at what we get.

BALL: Yes, absolutely.

COWEN: Isn’t that evidence that the gene-centered view, while maybe incomplete, in predictive terms is really doing very well?

BALL: [laughs] Is really doing very well.

COWEN: What would be a prediction your biological ecosystem view has in those cases that the gene-centered view would not have?

BALL: Well, this isn’t some rival to that position. This is an expression of what we have, an attempt to summarize what we have learned over the past 10 or 20, 30 years — since the Human Genome Project, really — about the way life really functions. Within that, it’s absolutely beyond question that genes have a central role to play. Of course they do. They are the things that we inherit from one generation to the next.

It’s absolutely the case, as you say, that we can use now a gene-editing technique like CRISPR, and we’re getting better ones now, more accurate ones even. We can use that to address some diseases that are caused by a gene mutation. It’s been used, for example, to cure sickle cell anemia, which comes about because of a gene, a mutation to one particular gene. It’s possible that it might be used for things like cystic fibrosis, for which that is also true.

All of these applications are for diseases that are — in sickle cell anemia, maybe this is less so — but most of them are rare, and they are traced back to just one particular gene or maybe a couple of genes. They’re monogenic. In those situations, we can edit that gene, whether, in principle, in the embryo or sometimes in the adult body, as is being done in sickle cell anemia. We can make that edit, and we can have a predictable response on the whole, a predictable response from that edit. That’s absolutely true because the condition is being caused by a single gene.

Most of the health conditions that concern the developed world — most, in fact, that concern the entire world — heart conditions, obesity, diabetes — as well as just about all the physical traits we have — height and intelligence and so on — cannot be traced back to just one or two genes. Differences in different individuals seem to be correlated with differences in the genetic profile of many genes, sometimes hundreds, sometimes even thousands of genes, a significant part of our total complement of genes.

That is what’s become clear, and that is why it’s not at all clear that techniques like CRISPR gene editing are going to be at all useful to address diseases like that. Not only because you’d have so many targets you’d have to try to hit, and you’re going to get some off-target hits, and that’s going to cause problems. Also, because all of those genes — they’re not just involved in that one thing. They’re doing all kinds of tasks. They’re doing many things.

If you start changing them around, you don’t know what else you’re going to be producing, what other kind of phenotypic changes you’re going to produce. What we need to understand is not to identify the genes and think we can address the problem or the condition there, because it’s arising at some other level in the organism, at a higher level, somehow, in the way all these genes are interacting with each other and with the other components of the genome, the other components of the body, perhaps in directing cells to do something different.

It’s at a higher level that the real causation of a lot of these conditions arises. It’s there that we need to be thinking about intervening. That’s really one of the messages that I’m wanting to get across in the book. It absolutely doesn’t bring into question that idea that, for some conditions, we can identify specific genes that are in a real sense the cause of that outcome. But for most of the way life works, for most of the things we’re interested in, in development and in medicine, that’s not going to do the job. We have to have a higher level of understanding how that condition, how that trait is coming about.

That’s a more complex business that I’m trying to tease apart in my book.

COWEN: I have some general questions about science for you. I read Karl Friston with the free energy principle, the notion that it makes sense to understand systems as somehow minimizing the difference between the state of affairs prevailing at a moment and the goals of an organism. In psychology, this translates into some view of minimizing surprise. Things somehow happen so that what the agent expects and what happens — those two are brought together. Are these useful ideas or are they just semantic reorganizations? Are scientists picking up on this? What’s the status of all this work?

BALL: This is the so-called free energy principle that Karl Friston — Karl is a neuroscientist at UCL here — has been a central proponent of, and I see different views on this. I think it’s too early to say to what extent it will be useful. I find it a very interesting idea. A lot of neuroscientists are looking into ways in which they might be able to use this idea to formulate and maybe even to answer questions. It is something that can be formalized. There is a mathematical theory behind it.

But others have said — and I think this is a common complaint I might have about these kinds of . . . In some ways, they tend to be theories of everything, or theories of a very big thing, at least. Sometimes, in order to be so, they become so abstract, so mathematically abstract that it becomes very hard to see how you relate the ideas — which are interesting and maybe even productive in themselves — but how to relate them to the lab work that a biologist, that a neuroscientist is doing.

How does it relate to what they’re actually finding out? How does it help them to pose new questions and to construct and devise new experiments? At the moment, it feels to me as though it’s at the stage of quite an abstract idea that people are trying to find ways of turning into something more concrete to address a specific problem — whether it’s in neuroscience or elsewhere, or maybe even computer science — to see whether it’s going to be useful.

I applaud the fact that we have theories like this that are very general theories that are trying to understand something. In this case, Karl thinks that in some sense, it can be considered a generalized theory of agency. Whether or not that’s true, I think that a generalized theory of agency is absolutely something that science needs.

COWEN: I have a number of friends who seem to be quite worried that they have too many microplastics in their testicles and in their bodies more generally. Is there serious evidence behind that worry?

BALL: I haven’t followed the work on whether they’re accumulating in the testicles. It would be certainly concerning if that was the case. There have been discussions about whether plastic pollution has some role in what we seem to see as a decline in sperm count, in male fertility. In the more general sense, microplastics are absolute — there’s clear evidence that it’s a problem, that you see them everywhere. You see them in the Antarctic; you see them in marine organisms. It’s very clear that they’re now a global pollution problem.

COWEN: What’s the harm to me, as a body?

BALL: I don’t think we know yet, actually. I think that’s the problem, that it may be still too early to know to what extent that’s going to be a problem. I can’t help feeling that any substance that doesn’t break down, that simply accumulates in the body in this way — that doesn’t sound like something that you want to have happening in your bodies and in your tissues.

It’s also sometimes suggested that some of the additives, the plasticizers that are added to plastics like this can function a little bit . . . They look chemically or a little bit like certain hormones, so they can mimic hormones and induce hormonal changes in the body. There’s a lot of research going to that at the moment that I’m absolutely not an expert in, but that’s one of the concerns that’s being raised about them.

COWEN: Michael Webb put forward the hypothesis that progress in science has declined radically in percentage terms. And he points out, in terms of the number of scientists, we have many, many, many more, not to mention more in China, more in India, more around the world. Yet overall rates of productivity growth — they’re not higher. They’re actually somewhat lower than, say, in the 1960s. We now have many more women in science. Has there been this radical slowdown in the pace of actual discovery per scientist? Not in absolute terms, but per worker. Are scientists today, per worker, just much worse?

BALL: [laughs] Just worse. Yes, good question. There have been some studies that have tried to quantify this, and there have been suggestions that, actually, transformational discoveries seem to be slowing down more recently. That seems a bit of an odd thing to say in this age. We’ve talked about AI, but also biotechnologies. Some of the biotechnologies that are appearing today are so incredibly powerful and transformative. But I’d say, first of all, that it’s not entirely obvious that we can expect to see advances in scientific understanding relating to productivity growth. It depends what science we’re doing.

Certainly, if we’re trying to understand the topology of the universe, say, we can’t expect to see much commercial return from that, certainly not directly. But I think that what I do see happening is that increasing the expansion of science — really, maybe it is, to some extent, a victim of its own success, that you see the increasing institutionalization of science.

Sometimes, it seems that it gives rise to a more conservative approach to things, a more cautious approach to things, so that it becomes harder for scientists who are working at what you might think of as a more high-risk frontier of research. It becomes harder for them to do that. It becomes harder for them to find funding, becomes harder for them to get their papers published because of this increasing caution.

There’s what statisticians might say is a regression to the mean. Everything becomes a little bit more mediocre and safe. A lot of people in science complain that blue-skies research, as they call it, research that is just saying, “What if? What happens if? What would happen?” Just curiosity-driven research — that’s becoming harder and harder to do because there’s an increasing demand for short-term commercial return on scientific research. That perhaps gives rise to a greater timidity in what science is being permitted. I think that that does seem to be a problem.

I think it’s hard to know what to expect, I have to say, because one could also argue, “Well, we’ve got all the low-hanging fruit. All the easier stuff to figure out about how the world works and about what things to make — we’ve done that. Now we’re on to the really hard stuff, so it’s diminishing returns.”

Now, I don’t know if that’s true. I think that there are still immense questions that we haven’t answered in science, but they seem to be incredibly hard ones, questions like what is consciousness, which we don’t even know if science will ever really answer that or whether it’s a philosophical question. But it’s possible that part of that decline in science is because we’re looking at more challenging problems now.

COWEN: Last set of questions is about you. What’s your favorite science fiction book?

BALL: Ooh, that’s a very nice question. I don’t read as much science fiction as I used to, but I read all of Philip K. Dick’s books, really, in my younger years. I think they had that mythic quality that I found in those older myths that I talked about.

I also devoured the works of J.G. Ballard. It was very interesting to me how, back in those days, Ballard was just dismissed as a genre writer, a science fiction writer, and he never had any proper characters and so forth. These days, Ballard is seen as a total visionary, as he clearly is. He saw so much of what was coming back in the 1960s. I would certainly name those two as two of my favorite science fiction writers.

COWEN: Now, you do not have a traditional academic post and for a long time have not had one. If you meet a young writer who’s very smart, great worker, and he or she wants to go into science writing, what advice do you give? What is it they should know that maybe they don’t know? Because you’ve done it.

BALL: Well, I did it back in the day when one could just wander randomly into it, as I did, whereas these days, it’s much more professionalized. I think that’s very good that you can now take courses in science journalism and learn how to do things properly in a way that I had to learn on the job in a very messy way. I absolutely think that that would be something I would recommend, get a training in science journalism because some of them are very good. They will equip you to do what you want to do.

I would say, for anyone thinking about wanting to go into science book writing, it’s really important that you aren’t doing it so that you’re going to become rich because it’s the same for any writer, actually. This is not a way to become rich. You have to love what you’re doing. You have to have a real passion for what you’re doing.

Certainly, for book writing, it feels to me like you have to have something to say. It’s not enough to just do a translation job of a difficult field. You really need to have something to bring to it, some insight to bring to it. Figure out what it is you want to say, and figure out what kind of voice you want to say it in. The way to do that is to read, to read very widely, and to find out what works for you, what sort of voice works for you.

COWEN: With someone who’s written about 30 science books, and most of them have more than one thing to say, what trait is it in you that has given rise to you having so many things to say relative to so many of your peers?

BALL: [laughs] Well —

COWEN: What’s the sauce in Philip Ball, the secret sauce?

BALL: I’d hesitate to put it that way when so many of my peers do such a fantastic job. I think for me, what it is, is that I have this extremely privileged position of being able to choose a topic and spend two, three, however many years really digging into it. I’ve always felt, given that opportunity, I really want to make the best use of it that I can. I want to continually be finding out about new topics, to take that opportunity to discover something entirely new.

There are some writers — not just in science — who decide, “This is going to be my area. I’m going to become a specialist in this area. I’m going to become known for writing about this topic.” That’s fine if you clearly want to do that, but for me, it’s just such a wonderful opportunity to express and give free rein to my curiosity, to find out about these new topics. They pop up. They suggest themselves.

I would never have imagined myself way back when, working for Nature, writing a book about Gothic cathedrals. That presented itself in one way or another. The more I started looking into it, the more I thought, “There’s a story here, and it’s a story that I haven’t really seen told, a story about how the cathedrals were built in connection with an emerging new view of the cosmos, a new view of how the world worked in the Middle Ages.” That’s the kind of thing that I look for. I’m waiting for the penny to drop of “Aha. I can see something new in here, and this is an area that I’m going to be enriched by spending two or three years finding out about.”

COWEN: Before I pose my last question, just again, your latest book, How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology. Final query: What will you do next?

BALL: Now, that I have to keep under wraps. I’ve just had a book deal pretty much agreed, and I am going to keep that under wraps for now. But what I can tell you is next-next: That is the book that is going to come out later this year, which I’ve already written. It’s a relatively short book because it’s highly illustrated. I’ve done one or two others of this sort with the same publisher, and it’s an illustrated history of alchemy. That’s what I’ve been writing since finishing How Life Works.

As I knew I would, I’ve had a fantastic time writing it, and I know that, because I’ve worked with these people before, it is going to look absolutely gorgeous. An illustrated history of alchemy.

COWEN: Philip Ball, thank you very much.

BALL: Thank you.