Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding

Science writer and former Nature editor Philip Ball talks with Tyler Cowen about scientists’ fraught relationship with political power, why falling fertility is a social rather than a technological problem, the corrupting mythology of invisibility and Gothic cathedrals as cosmic architecture, and — drawing on his book How Life Works — why the ‘selfish gene’ picture of biology, though genuinely useful, is not an adequate account of how life actually works.

Key ideas

1. Scientists have rarely stood up effectively to political power, and today’s chief threat is internal, not external. Ball’s own research into Nazi-era German physicists found their institutional resistance ‘really not very impressive’; he argues the more urgent danger to scientific integrity now is publish-or-perish pressure, which pushes early-career scientists toward cognitive bias and, in some documented cases, outright fraud.
2. Falling fertility is a social choice problem, not a technology gap. Ball resists the idea that artificial wombs would fix declining birth rates, reading the decline as tracking women’s growing educational and career autonomy rather than any biological shortfall — and sees no cause to fear runaway depopulation even at the low fertility rates now common in rich countries.
3. Invisibility corrupts, from Plato’s ring of Gyges to online anonymity. The recurring myth of invisibility — reworked by H.G. Wells as The Invisible Man — carries one consistent lesson: removing accountability, not the loss of visibility itself, is what tempts people toward harm, a dynamic Ball connects directly to internet anonymity’s ‘Gyges effect’.
4. The ‘selfish gene’ model is valid but narrow, not a picture of how life works. Dawkins’s gene-centred view usefully explains how alleles spread through a population, but Ball argues most of biology — development, cognition, most disease — resists reduction to individual competing genes: genes must cooperate to build an organism, and most complex traits and diseases are highly polygenic, which is why techniques like CRISPR succeed for single-gene diseases but cannot address conditions like heart disease or diabetes.
5. The perceived warfare between science and religion is a 19th-century polemical invention. For 17th-century scientists such as Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton, studying nature was itself a form of religious duty; the idea of a deep historical conflict between the two, Ball argues, only became a dominant narrative later, for polemical reasons.

Content

Scientists and power: from Nazi Germany to publish-or-perish

Asked when scientists have most effectively resisted political power, Ball turns first to his own research into German physicists under the Nazi regime — the subject of an earlier book. His conclusion was bleak: most physicists acquiesced to the regime, and even where few were ideologically sympathetic, ‘they mounted no real effective opposition whatsoever.’ He singles out Werner Heisenberg’s attitude — that science operates in a ‘purer sphere’ insulated from politics — as an outlook that persists in science today and needs to be abandoned; scientists, he argues, work within social and political contexts they must be prepared to engage rather than simply endure.

Pressed on where today’s biases lie, Ball points less to fossil-fuel interests than to two internal pressures: commercial distortion of pharmaceutical research (systematic underreporting of null or negative drug trial results), and — more urgently, in his view — the ‘tremendous pressures, absolutely unrealistic pressures’ on scientists, especially those early in their careers, to publish constantly. He links this directly to high-profile cases of outright data fabrication and to a broader, harder-to-detect pull toward cognitive bias, where researchers find the results they are hoping to find. On climate science specifically, Ball — drawing on years spent handling the field’s top papers as a Nature editor — defends the profession’s historical caution as epistemically sound, even though it may have delayed the public alarm now widely regarded as overdue.

Fertility, artificial wombs, and the limits of technological fixes

Cowen presses Ball on artificial wombs as a possible answer to collapsing fertility rates — South Korea’s rate of 0.7, the Nordic countries’ 1–1.5 despite generous family policy. Ball is sceptical that the technology, still a century into slow development from both directions (extending survival for extremely premature infants; extending how long animal embryos can be grown outside the womb, bounded at 14 days for human embryos on ethical grounds), is even the right kind of answer. He reads falling birth rates as a social phenomenon rooted substantially in women’s expanding access to education and career choice, particularly visible in parts of Asia, rather than as evidence of any biological shortfall a new reproductive technology would solve.

He does not treat population decline itself as alarming: citing demographic projections of a peak around nine billion people followed by a fall toward roughly six billion, he calls that prospect ‘a fantastic thing’ given the strain population growth places on food, energy, and economic systems, and sees no present basis for fearing runaway depopulation.

Invisibility, myth, and the Gyges effect

Drawing on his book about invisibility, Ball traces the idea back to the myth of Gyges in Plato’s Republic — a shepherd who finds a ring of invisibility and uses it to murder a king, seduce the queen, and seize power — and forward to H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man, which retells the same story. Both, he argues, carry a single message: invisibility is a metaphor for the removal of responsibility, and removing responsibility corrupts. He connects this directly to online anonymity, sometimes explicitly called the ‘Gyges effect’, as a live instance of the same dynamic — people say and do online what they would never do face to face.

Asked to price a real capacity for invisibility, Ball estimates the military value alone would be enormous, and says he would like to think he would decline the power outright, comparing himself to Gandalf refusing the Ring — while admitting that, used without restraint, ‘the sky’s the limit’ on what it would be worth.

Chartres and the cosmic architecture of Gothic cathedrals

In his book Universe of Stone, Ball reads Chartres Cathedral — his favourite of the early true Gothic cathedrals — as a physical model of medieval cosmology, built during a Platonic revival centred on the Cathedral School of Chartres. Plato held that the cosmos rested on geometric harmony; Gothic cathedrals, Ball argues, were explicitly designed to the same simple ratios (1:2, 2:3) of height, width, and proportion, in order to convey cosmic order. He rejects Dan Brown-style readings that look for hidden codes: the cathedrals’ meaning, he says, sits in plain sight in the ratios themselves.

He endorses Napoleon’s observation that even an atheist feels uncertain of themselves inside a Gothic cathedral, describing his own reaction — as a self-identified atheist — inside Chartres as a ‘terrifying awe’, heightened by the grotesque, playful gargoyle carvings that stonemasons placed largely out of the priests’ sight, evidence of a subversive creative freedom running alongside the official theology.

Christianity, curiosity, and the Scientific Revolution

Asked whether Christianity was, on net, a positive or negative force behind the 17th-century Scientific Revolution, Ball resists framing it as a ledger of pros and cons. For scientists of the period, God’s existence was simply a given; for Robert Boyle specifically, investigating nature was itself a Christian duty — cataloguing the details of God’s creation. Ball prefers to call the era ‘the age when curiosity was liberated’ rather than the Scientific Revolution, contrasting it with earlier medieval theological suspicion of prying too far into nature. Isaac Newton’s cosmology needed a first mover to set the planets in motion; for Newton, this was simply God, which Ball treats not as a flaw in Newton’s physics but as part of the coherent framework within which Newton worked.

He does grant the counterexample of Galileo’s persecution — while noting that Galileo was, to some extent, ‘the architect of his own misfortune’ — but argues the popular idea of deep, inherent conflict between science and religion is, ‘in many ways… a modern construct’, one that only became a dominant narrative in the late 19th century, for polemical reasons, rather than a constant of the historical record.

Modern myths: zombies and the AI apocalypse

Drawing on his book The Modern Myths, Ball argues that a story typically needs roughly 50 years to acquire true mythic status — joining Robinson Crusoe, Frankenstein, Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde, Sherlock Holmes, and Batman — by coming to serve as a durable ‘tool for thinking with’ about a recurring social anxiety, without offering any tidy moral. He identifies the zombie-apocalypse narrative, crystallised in 1960s George Romero films, as a myth that has already reached that status, and argues a mythology of AI is forming now.

He is wary of the specific AI myth currently dominant: the far-future ‘AI apocalypse’, in which a superintelligent system turns on humanity. In his view this is a convenient story for AI companies to invoke, because it displaces public attention onto an indefinite future threat while the real, present-day harms — deepfakes, misinformation, and everyday overstatement of AI’s capabilities — go comparatively unaddressed.

How Life Works — beyond the selfish gene

Turning to his new book, How Life Works, Ball works through why some animals — salamanders, axolotls, and possibly (he is honestly unsure) octopuses — can regrow lost limbs while humans cannot. The capacity requires a reserve of stem-cell-like cells retaining broad developmental potential, communicating with neighbouring cells through chemical, mechanical, and electrical signals to determine what to become and where to stop — a process he agrees can loosely be described as a form of cellular computation, though its underlying ‘language’ remains poorly understood. Asked whether the brain itself performs computation, Ball stays agnostic about whether the silicon-chip analogy is the most useful frame for cognition, even while conceding that, at the most fundamental physical level, essentially all particle interactions can be described as a form of computation.

The book’s central target is Richard Dawkins’s selfish-gene picture. Ball does not reject it outright: as a model within evolutionary genetics — explaining how competing alleles spread through a population — he calls it valid and genuinely productive. The problem is its extension into a general account of how life works, because genes within a genome must cooperate, not compete, to build a body; the very concept of ‘a gene’ grows fuzzy once biologists look closely at the molecular level, with pseudogenes and regulatory regions outside coding sequence complicating the tidy picture. Pressed with Cowen’s counter-evidence — that CRISPR gene editing works predictably, curing sickle-cell anaemia and engineering crops with precision — Ball concedes the point fully for monogenic conditions. But most conditions that matter most for human health (heart disease, obesity, diabetes) and most complex traits (height, intelligence) are highly polygenic, involving hundreds or even thousands of genes each doing multiple jobs; editing single genes cannot address them, because the real causal action sits at a higher level of organisation than any individual gene.

The state of science: Friston’s free energy principle and slowing discovery

Asked about Karl Friston’s free energy principle — the idea that organisms act so as to minimise the gap between their predictions and incoming sensory evidence, or ‘surprise’ — Ball is cautiously positive about its ambition as a possible generalised theory of agency, but sceptical that, in its current highly abstract mathematical form, it yet connects usefully to the concrete questions working neuroscientists are trying to answer. Confronted with the claim (attributed to economist Michael Webb) that per-researcher scientific productivity has declined even as the global scientist population has grown sharply, Ball offers two competing, unresolved explanations: increasing institutional caution and risk-aversion in funding and publishing, pulling science toward safer, more mediocre work; or, more optimistically, that the remaining open questions — consciousness among them — are simply far harder than those science has already solved.

See also

• Philip Ball — speaker
• Tyler Cowen — host
• How Life Works — Ball’s 2024 book, the episode’s central subject
• Science and Religion — concept page extended by Ball’s conflict-thesis remarks