Speaker

Philip Ball

Philip Ball

British science writer and former editor at Nature for roughly twenty years, and the author of around thirty books ranging across chemistry, physics, the history of science, and social science.

Ball holds degrees in chemistry (Oxford) and physics (Bristol) and writes for Nature, New Scientist, the Guardian, the Financial Times, and other outlets alongside his books. His work is distinguished by range rather than specialisation: he moves between hard-science subjects (water, colour, the elements, molecular biology) and cultural or historical ones (Gothic cathedrals, modern mythology, music, the history of invisibility as an idea), typically spending two to three years immersed in each new topic before moving to the next. His most recent book, How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology (2024), argues against reducing biology to gene-centred explanation; earlier books include Universe of Stone (on Chartres Cathedral), The Modern Myths, and a study of the response of German physicists to the Nazi regime.

Core positions

  • The ‘selfish gene’ model is valid but narrow. Dawkins’s gene-centred picture productively explains how alleles spread through a population, but Ball argues it does not extend to how organisms develop or function: genes within a genome must cooperate to build a body, and most complex traits and diseases are highly polygenic, resisting single-gene explanation.
  • Invisibility corrupts by removing accountability. Reading the myth of Gyges (Plato) and H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man together, Ball argues both dramatise the same lesson: it is the loss of responsibility, not the loss of visibility itself, that tempts people toward harm — a dynamic he sees replayed in online anonymity.
  • Historical conflict between science and religion is a modern construct. For 17th-century scientists such as Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton, investigating nature was often itself a religious duty; Ball dates the popular ‘warfare’ narrative between science and religion to polemical arguments of the late 19th century, not to the historical record itself.
  • Scientific integrity today is threatened more from within science than from outside it. Historically, scientists have rarely mounted effective resistance to political power; Ball sees the more urgent present danger as publish-or-perish institutional pressure, which drives cognitive bias and occasional outright fraud, especially among early-career researchers.

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