hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with Tyler today I'll be chatting with Philip ball I think of Phillip this way I mean we've had over 200 guests 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 Phillip I believe is number four he is 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 sh social science color the elements water water in China chra Cathedral music and more but most notably he has a new book out this year a major work called how life Works a users's guide to the new biology Phillip welcome thank you Tyler lovely to be
here 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 gosh now there's a there's a question to start with where they have most effectively stood up to
power you know um this is a question that I looked at in a a book it must have be about 10 years old now which looked at the response of German physicist s during the Nazi era to that regime and I'm afraid the response my conclusion was the response was really
not very impressive at all that you know on the whole the the scientists acquiesced to what the regime wanted them to do even if they weren't I mean very few of them were uh actively uh sympathetic to the Nazi party but they mounted no real effective opposition whatsoever and I'm afraid that looking
at that as a 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 uh some kind of ideology or political power or whatever so uh
it's history doesn't give us a very encouraging uh view of that um I think you know that said um I think it's fair to say science is doing better these days um there's 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 and I think we're starting to see that certainly with climate change um which you know scientists have come Under Fire a huge amount um in that Arena and I think there's there's more sort of institutional uh understanding of 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 still think that there's a a a there's this attitude I think that is still somewhat prevalent within science that it's a bit like we're above that this is exactly what some of the German
physicists particularly Vera Heisenberg said um during the the Nazi regime that science is somehow operating in a Pur sphere um and that it's you know 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 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 to take some control
of and not simply to be pushed around by and that I think is something that can only happen when there's an in when there are institutional structures to allow it to happen so that scientists are not left to their own individual deves and their own individual sense of
morality to do something about it so I'm hoping that science will do better in the future than it's done in the past which do you think are the power structures today that current scientists say in the Anglo world are most enthrall to so you wouldn't say it's the fossil fuel companies right so I Abate change
many people have spoken up but on what issues is there still this problem where are the biggest biases now well there there's absolutely there there there are uh questions being asked and concerning uh um situations arising with the relationship between um between science
and what you might call Commerce really between and Industry so 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 interest involved you know
it's very clear that certainly pharmaceutical companies themselves tend to under report um uh any any work that seems to conflict with what the you know the message they want to put out um if they're developing a drug um so there's Under reporting of negative effects or
of null effects um so I think that that that this the the conflict between scientific research and the commercial interests relating to it is one area where that there there are real problems uh to be solved um and questions to be asked but I think that there's also now an increasing problem simply within the
the the structures of Academia itself um I think this is the thing that perhaps worries me most about uh the way science is being steered or pushed these days that there are these tremendous pressures absolutely unrealistic pressures on scientists and particularly
young scientists starting their careers to publish as as much as they can um and to uh uh you know to to uh I 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 and it has led um in
recent times to some quite high-profile cases of scientific misconduct where results have been basically data has just been invented to you know to to to uh create a publish publishable piece of work uh so you know and and I think that even when that's not quite so obviously
fraudulent I think there's there there are strong pressures on scientists to find the results that they are hoping to find so there's a a strong uh pressure for cognitive biases to creep in um so this is something that is that that ought to be eminently fixable because
there is no reason science has to be this way that have to be these tremendous pressures on scientists to constantly be producing results um constantly be chasing after the you know what some sometimes seems like the diminishing pools of funding um there must be better ways of doing things than
this but we haven't yet found them and 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 when it comes to policy do you think current scientists are too safety
conscious I wouldn't say they are actually um in in well in policy now that really depends what you mean I mean there are for example you know we can raise this question during the pandemic was there too much uh caution with things like the testing of vaccines or the you know the various measures that
were introduced and of course that is a question that became hugely politicized um from what I saw I think that it absolutely wasn't the case with the vaccines I think that the the balance was was exactly right there that they were properly tested while still being
um accelerated um to a degree that you know we absolutely needed and 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 those risks um with because they they they have the the the financial backing so I think in terms of things like that in terms of the safety of pharmaceuticals I think that at the moment I at the moment I see no no cause
for concern there have been worries about whether scientists have been too cautious um in coming for in in in uh in their views about climate change so that you know 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 about it then as they are now when things are getting to a really desperate stage and that was a process that I really saw unfold as an editor of nature we were handling a lot of the the top climate papers you know at that time when the
the the worries of uh climate change were starting to be raised and 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 uh allowed them to say with confidence and 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 seemed clear that that that you know 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 and it's very hard to know you know how to manage that um uh that that that discrepancy um but I I do feel that
now we can be very confident in the uh the conclusions that have been reached and so it's absolutely right that that scientists climate scientists in particular are really making strong statements and raising the alarm about what the future holds in in in this
regard so I don't think that there's too much caution there how far away are we from having artificial wombs that work yeah well this has been certainly a question for the part well it's actually been a question for almost a hundred years now this was something that um uh
some scientists were de debating the 1920s and 1930s in fact it was that debate that led to um uh Alis huxley's Brave New World which essentially talks about this sort of invetro gestation of of whole populations so you know that question has been around and that research has been around for for at
least a 100 years now we're getting closer it's it's an incredibly slow process um and we're we're kind of coming at it from two both directions now so there are Technologies there there there are techniques now that are being used to keep alive babies that who are born very very prematurely that
would previously have died um and then from the other direction it's becoming possible to grow embryos for long and longer periods um 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 um with animal embryos uh that it it's it's clear that they can be grown for much longer than that um almost to the point of of full gestation actually certainly up until about sort of halfway through where you've you've really got something like a fetus so we have the
technologies that are that are getting there from these two directions I think the broader question is do we why would we need a technology like that to do the whole job certainly for humans it's not clear that we we that there's a call for it it's not clear that there's any real
social driver for that sort of Technology having there is a big fertility crisis right oh there absolutely well there is for various reasons we need more people in in the future at some point well I if we need more more people in future I don't think I mean think this is one of those
problems like many problems that is a a a social and economic problem that is not going to be solved by technology um so you know the idea that if if uh and it's it's questionable if this really is the case but if there if there is the case of declining fertility um it's not
at all obvious that the reasons that that that what we there 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 the all of the uh the E ethical and and uh safety issues
associated with potential technology like that um but also because I I if there is a decline infertility infertility rates in the number of children being born in some countries that isn't because it's impossible that is because of uh of of social changes that are the things that we need need to
be looking at to if you know if we're concerned about a problem like that I mean it's not clear to me that it actually is a problem at the moment you know the problem of population growth is is is the problem that we still face so I'm not sure that we're going to see
artificial WBS uh developed um in the in the near future for human reproduction because I don't think that there's a a clear need for them but isn't that a case of scientists maybe yourself included being too cautious so you understand ASM tootes a smaller population would be fine 5 years from
now but if we just keep on shrinking it seems virtually every country except Israel uh and parts of Africa have gone below replacement rates right often considerably below South Korea is at 0.7 uh we can't just have things shrink shrink shrink I mean the ethical and
danger implications of that are quite extreme especially for countries with debt or a lot of retirees well I think one of the as you say one of the issues that that raises is more about the demographic the change in demographic where you have an increasingly aging population um and you know that's also
because we're living longer in in a lot of countries and uh so that that certainly needs to be talked about and we need to think about what the answer to that is I'm not sure that the answer to that is simply to to to have more more children it's been predicted by I
mean I'm no expert in in demographics but it's been predicted by demographers for for a long time that actually we we we were going to go and are going to go through a a population hump that we're going to it's going to Peak at maybe something like 9 billion or so and then
it's predicted to decrease to something more like perhaps six billion or something which I think would be a fantastic thing because you know it it that that is one of the one of the big challenges that we have been facing is the growth in in population the demands that that cre for food production for
energy for economic growth generally so I I I don't see um any reason to uh to believe that a you know a decline from that if we reach that figure of n billion that a decline from that um is going to be inherently bad in in itself and I certainly don't think that at this
point there is any reason for anyone to fear that somehow the population is going to you know shrink to to nothing I don't think anyone feels that's the case but I but I do feel that as I say it's if there are concerns of that sort to be raised then what we need to be asking is
what is behind the um this this decline in in you know in in fertility um it's not in it's not fertility in the technical sense it's not infertility there are issues there uh to some degree but that doesn't seem to be causing the the the uh 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 but it could simply be for a lot of people kids aren't that fun and we're just on that ASM toote 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 well in my experience kids are a lot of fun um uh but I think it's really important
that you know not everyone is made to feel as though they ought to feel that way um so absolutely I think if people choose uh to to to not to have children then you know I think that that should be I there's there's often a problem actually that that um if people make
that choice it becomes stigmatized you know it's it's it becomes what is your problem with children and I absolutely you know I think that's a terrible sort of attitude to take I think it absolutely has to be a a matter of personal choice I think for some people also I mean there are all sorts of
reasons why this seems to be happening um you know for for some people it may be an economic one uh kids cost a lot of money um and uh you know not everyone can uh can afford that in in some it's the Richer societies where birth rates fall right in ner you have seven kids to
a family the nors which have free child care all sorts of benefits from mothers I mean they're you know often between 1 and 1.5 and they do many things right they're very nice places pretty easy to raise kids there and they're going to disappear I don't know that they're
going to disappear I think it would be it's important to understand why it is those Trends are happening um and to have some sorts of projections of how they might ultimately uh play out my understanding is certainly that in some Asian countries where birth rates are
falling it's but I think this may be true actually in some African countries as well it it seems to be there seems to be some connection to the increasing empowerment of women which you know has to be a good and important thing and particularly in some Asian countries um women are increasingly realiz
increasingly thinking you know why should I follow the traditional route of uh you know getting married young raising a family rather than having a a career and also as as that women in those countries get greater access to education um they become a bit more Discerning about you
know what they're going to to uh accept what they're going to look for in a partner and what they're not and I think that too has to be a good thing um and I think that you know if that's the case if women are finding actually you know what I would uh rather not you know
start a family young get married young I would rather actually have a career I would rather um have my my own independence um I I it seems to me that not only is that uh is that a positive thing in itself but that is something we need to we need to understand why is it
so um why do women have to you know why are they faced with making that choice why are they faced with the choice of either a a career or you know a conventional uh family life um so I I think that the again these seem to me to qu social questions that we need to ask that don't have and shouldn't have a
technological solution why isn't the human body more symmetric so my heart's on my left side right uh yeah it's pretty symmetric um it's you know we do have this bilateral symmetry but it's not perfectly uh so and the question yeah the question of of of why that is so why we have these
small asymmetries I'm not sure it may be wrong but I'm not sure that that's um something to which we have a a clear answer you know it may be I mean we 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 um and uh you know the it's it's really fascinating to see how that happens and and 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 um why you know does how
does that symmetry get broken in the first place to create any sort of structure um so we have some understanding of of how it happens developmentally but whether there's a an Adaptive benefit or a physiological benefit to these small asymmetries that appear certainly internally in the body
I'm really not sure um you know it may just in some cases be an evolutionary accident 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 you know Wells as 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 and 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 what is it
what's the equilibrium yeah exactly and Tyler it's so interesting that those the two things you you know a light on as hey you could do those things because that really is the message of uh H wells's book and it's a message that he took from an ancient myth that you first
crops up in Plato's Republic um a myth of the of of a chap called GES who is a Shepherd who finds a ring of invisibility so he's you know um he's just going about his job as a shepherd and then he comes across this ring and uh what does he do he uh the first thing he does is he gets to go on um the the
sort of um expedition of of I guess it's s of taking the taxes or something to the king and uses the ring to kill the king seduce the queen and become the ruler the tyrant in fact of the population and the the the the message that Plato wanted us to to get from that
story and that HG worlds wanted us to get when he rewrote it as the Invisible Man is invisibility corrupts the um I mean and invisibility there is a kind of metaphor for lack of responsibility when you can evade responsibility for your actions which is exactly what you know
you're talking about we could do if we had this ring of invisibility that is a corrupting uh capability to have and it's it seems almost inevitable that that is what happens and 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 um we see that that that encourages them to do things and to say things that they would never do to someone in person um and sometimes
is even called the gues effect so the these stories that we we have told traditionally about invisibility seem to have this kind of uh this moral conclusion that actually invisibility it sounds like it would be a wonderful superpower but we have to really uh be beware of that that Temptation because
it's it's a very strong corrupting influence I mean look it's that's of course that's what happened in The Lord of the Rings right um that was the uh entirely the metaphor of the the you know the rig of power there so I would say I mean you know in military terms
invisibility would probably be be worth enormous amounts and military in particular is investing in research that is you know that is trying to to find materials and so forth that can confer some degree of invisibility whether it's to radar or to infrared or whatever um
but uh but I I I I I think the message from history and from mythology is that invisibility is a power to be very wary of and do you think you could turn it into aund million or a billion dollars or how much I think you could name your price if you had a technology that no no
only you you're invisible no one else can do it you can lift wallets from people's pockets whatever you want you see uh having having written that book and having looked into the history of it I would like to feel that if someone said 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 I know where that that stuff leads um so you know if if if one had it then of course the you know the sky's the limit you
could take what you liked um and that that's the worry so uh yeah for me I would say I would love to feel that I would resist that Temptation 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 well we find
it I mean I I certainly find it beautiful I find it beautiful to to see it from Earth actually I find Space itself the thought of space itself terrifying and I feel that's really how we should see it um and in the you know this era of of of space travel I think
um we're seeing that that's the case I mean I I was really struck by how when uh William Shatner was taken by uh Jeff Bezos on his one of these flights on the uh is it called Blue origin the flight the you know the yes um so he took Shatner up there Shatner of course being
being Captain Kirk of Star Trek and um sh and Shatner came came back and and said he he found he felt this profound emptiness really loneliness terrifying loneliness he he he felt that he was looking at death when he looked out into space which is absolutely not not not what you expect to hear from
from Captain Kirk right um and I think that's right I think that's the right way to see it space you know 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 with radiation you know obviously it's it's incredibly
cold it's a vacuum um so it's a deathly place so I think that that space looks beautiful to us from Earth from this place of safety and it's 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 and you know from that perspective it it is it is or inspiring and you know that's that's really I mean I guess I feel when I when
I you know look out on a night like that when I'm away from London away from the light pollution um that what I feel is all in the old sense in the 19th century um sense of the sublime this sort of slightly terrified um awe of you know what what is out there of of our I
wouldn't say our insignificance but our small part in something that is just so vast um you know when you really think about what all these pin Pricks of light represent you know some of them being certainly if you look through a telescope some of them being entire
galaxies um and we have no idea we really have no idea how far that goes out to it is it it it there's a be Beauty to it but it's a terrifying Beauty speaking of terrifying what's the hidden or you could say straussian reading of the chartre cathedral in France ah well there's um the way I
presented it in in in my book I've my book Universe of stone and the idea behind that title was that in some sense the gothic Cathedrals and chhatra is it's certainly my favorite and I think it's it's one of the 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 kind of medieval cosmology because at that time and in fact as it happened particularly in charta in the Cathedral School of of charta there was a a Resurgence of interest in the philosophy the
philosophy of Plato and Plato had this idea that the whole of the cosmos was built on principles of a sort of cosmic Harmony that that involved geometric ratios between things and so the the gothic Cathedrals themselves have they they are planned according to um ideal
ratios simple ratios of you know uh height and and width and and so on of proportion ratios of 1 to2 and 2 to three and that um that that uh that that design and that that wish to sort of convey somehow this kind of sense of order and Cosmic Harmony that's I think what we respond to even today in
in those places even though we of course we can't see them through medieval eyes and we're used to seeing now gigantic constructions of All Sorts but nevertheless for me the the the the gothic Cathedrals still retain something that modern architecture hasn't manage to capture in
the in the in the sense of conveying that kind of sense of Harmony and and and Order uh so so that's absolutely what the the gothic Cathedrals were were aiming to do and the um you know we know that the the people who were designing them the as we would now think of them
as The Architects were um were drawing on those platonic ideas of Harmony and trying to express them explicitly in what they did so there's nothing um I mean this um you know this is it starts to sound like we're getting into Dan Brown territory here um and you know
people have claimed and I think it's probably claimed in Dan Brown's novels that uh there are all sorts of hidden codes and so on within the uh the gothic Cathedrals but I think actually the the 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 but it's Harmony plus demons right like I take the message of the cathedral to be demons rule even the heavens you mean because you know it's like shaten are in
outer space I'm in the cathedral I I thinking my goodness this is terrifying you know that's exactly what Napoleon is said to have said um when uh because you know B brought so the Republic you know the the French Republic had had was you know famously going to get rid of all
this uh religious uh nonsense and it was going to be you know a kind of a built on on principles of re reason and and and and so on Napoleon said that in the gothic Cathedrals you know even an atheist will feel kind of Uncertain of themselves because of that and I think
that's that's quite right I think it's absolutely right I mean I'm an atheist and I certainly had that feeling inside char um and there is something again there is something about that sort of terrifying awe um and and but I think there it's also a kind of an awe just at the sheer
feet of engineering that would you know that that they represent that was done by obviously you know by hand I mean with very sort of primitive uh machinery for lifting and so on but you know there there was no mechanization there and so the the the sheer fact that these places
were built and that they are still standing so many of them after you know a thousand years is is is is truly extraordinary um and and I think I mean you know I thought you might be talking about the fact that you do also literally in some of these Cathedrals have the the demons around you you have
the the Gargoyles um sort of up there looking down at you um I I think that to some extent and we can see this in in in you know 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 you know often quite playful uh uh carvings high up there you know sort of out of sight perhaps of the of the priests uh where they you know they were free to let their imagination uh have free reign why is so much late
medieval culture science you could say music tapestry work concentrated in northern France what what was special about that region at the time um at the the the the early Gothic era certainly did uh uh start in in northern France so it's it's this region called the E de France um so it's the region I
suppose it's within I can't remember quite uh what distance it's typically said to be but I think within about 50 mile radius of of Paris and um that was was absolutely that was a center of of learning at that time um Britain I have to say England was very much an
intellectual Backwater at that time um so France was 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 um had been so to some extent ever since the
emperor Charlamagne um in the uh um in in in the 9th century um so it it had had this stability and charag in fact himself was uh famously wanted to sort of bring about a sort of resurgence of learning it only really kicked off um in the in in the around the the 11th century 11th 12th centuries are often
called the the Medieval Renaissance but I have to say that a lot of that learning was imported uh was brought from the um Islamic countries from from uh Spain which was uh you know occupied by what were then called the Moors and be because you know in the centuries preceding that
era that was the the era of the golden age of learning in the in in the uh Islamic Nations and um they the Islamic scholars translated a lot of the The Works of the ancient Greeks Aristotle and Plato and many others um into Arabic and the European scholars many of them
from France but also from Germany and from uh from 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 and so that was really what created this influx of uh of of uh
learning into Western Europe at that time it was coming from translations of Arabic works 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 but do you view Christianity as
being a net positive or negative behind that development I guess I feel in a way that's a a question that um it's it's it's hard to see what the uh what what the uh counterfactuals would be to that because you know history is history right so um to to all of the scientists
um in the certainly in the in the 17th century the time that's often called the the Scientific Revolution um Christianity was was was just a given the you know the fact that uh that God existed you know no one really at that time questioned that they had different ways of understanding that and of
expressing that but for for for those Scholars um you know that was just a given and so that informed everything that they were doing so it for some people um for example the the Anglo Irish um uh scientist as we now see him Robert Bole in the 17th century um it
was a it was a u 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 to be curious to be interested in in everything in nature and Bole would make these long lists the sort of
random lists of things he wanted to find out about things he wanted to to discover it was really the the the first golden age of curiosity that time and I think that's 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 kind of liberated so there was in in earlier times in medieval times there was often a sense expressed um by some theologians that Curiosity was something to be at best cautious of and at worse very suspicious of or even condemning of because they saw it as a prying into things
that it was not humankind's um preserved to ask about um whereas uh you know in in the by the 17th century um really through the process of the Renaissance and the humanism and the Resurgence of learning um it had become it became acceptable to have this almost Universal
curiosity about the world and that's absolutely something that we see in people like Bole and Newton and the um the fellows of the Royal Society in in um in London but also of other scientific uh societies that started elsewhere in Europe um and as I say underpinning all of that was a profound
religious faith and sometimes that was so sometimes that was um you know a motivation for that Curiosity and sometimes it was in the case of of Isaac Newton for example it was um that was the framework within which he was developing his theory of gravitation the
question with uh the the the picture that he presented of um the the planets you know revolving around the Sun and the Moon revolving around the earth because of uh gravitational force being held there by gravity that was all very well but the question was well how did
that get started how you know 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 it was God's creation and and it gave a coherence really to the picture that he
was he was looking for so I I I don't think that um I mean you can certainly find um of course the obvious uh counter example is is the persecution of Galileo which is often uh sort of 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 um so there were AB absolutely there were tensions between this this new understanding this new way of thinking about the world and the old idea the the old idea According to some that you know you shouldn't ask
too much or that it was well it was just God that that did it all there were tensions there but I don't know that we need sort of see that as a you know put put it as as as weighing in the balance the pros and the cons it was simply how history was it was simply how ideas
evolved um so yeah I I kind of know 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 um so you know 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 become emphasized in the late 19th century for various reasons for pical reasons I don't think it something that we can uh really see throughout the
history of science 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 Robin Caruso is still around as a story or Sherlock Holmes is still around what would those myths be or have we stopped producing them no I I'm sure
we haven't stopped producing them so my book about myths was actually about what I call the modern myths and it's exactly those th those uh stories so I begin with the earliest one that I look at from early modern times is Robinson cruso and I bring it right through and
and you know I think um it it wasn't it wasn't difficult to identify the the the the cat the candidates for that sort of status so they were things like Frankenstein Dracula Jael and Hyde Sherlock Holmes and the latest myth I look at in that book is Batman um uh so
you know that's 100 years old now actually it's amazing to think that that's the case but it virtually is um and uh and I don't think there's any reason to believe that we have stopped this process of inventing modern myths uh but I I feel that it probably takes at least 50 years before some new
narrative clearly acquires that sort of Mythic status and I think that one of them that is now emerging that has is the zombie myth and um you know we we've I mean the idea of zombies is is is an old one it started to become popularized in sort of Western culture in the
1930s um but I think it was really crystallized in the uh in the the sort of horror movie you know the B movie horror films of the 1960s particularly the George Romero films so I think that we now all have a sense that you know the the zombie myth is something about
the the zombie apocalypse um and you know so it's it's not individual zombies it's the we're being o you know humanity is overrun by uh by a horde of of mindless zombies and that's you know so that's that's the sort of basis of the myth we sort of have that now and I
think that we're going to I think it's inevitable that we're going to continue to develop myths because what I argue in that book is that we have these these narratives acquire Mythic status because they satisfy some need in us to explore anxiety ities social anxieties in
stories in a way that allows us to look at them and explore them and think about them myth are tools for thinking with they don't have a moral they don't have a a clear conclusion they allow us to to explore those anxieties and there will always sadly there will always be new
anxieties that erase we are starting to see a myth we already have to some extent a mythology of AI that's absolutely going to be a Nexus around which certain myth Oles are going to start growing and that's you know 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 you know uh strong and with us and uh and and prevalent and so we're going to need myths to explore them um one thing I I sort of feel about that is that there are pros and cons to that because you know the myth that we have
around Ai and it's one that's being fed at the moment sometimes by tech companies even is is the of the AI apocalypse the AI take over that we you know 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 sort of 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 the real dangers and risks and things to be worried about with AI are much more main mundane things that are here and now you
know deep fakes the production of misinformation the misu the trivial but but sometimes important misuses of of of AI because we attribute it too much power those are the things that we should really be be concerned about now but uh so you know it could be that the
myths that we develop kind of get in the way of the things we should really be worrying about in the here and now 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 sort of what exactly in the octopus nose 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 right I don't have that regulator yeah
yeah yeah 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 but some creatures can and certainly salamanders can axotal can they can regrow uh limbs that they have lost so
some creatures some you know complex creatures um can uh can do this and we don't know exactly what enables them to do that other than that in order to do that you have you will have to have a um a reserve of something like stem cells something that maintains a kind of stem
cell- like State like the cells that we grew from in the early embryo those are stem cells that cells that in in the the early embryo they're able to grow into any tissue type in the body and we have in in our bodies we have what are called adult stem cells which can um produce a
limited number of tissue types so we have them for example in our bone marrow they they they Contin produce the different types of cells in our blood um but they can't you know produce muscle cells or you know um brain cells or something um whereas you know in in
creatures that can regenerate their limbs they seem to have a kind of stem cell that can regrow into you know many different T 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 and you know um sort of finding its way together that is a profound one that I think we don't yet fully know the answer to um and you know it's a re 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 axotal might it not be possible to develop some kind of capability like that in humans and we don't know the answer to that but it's not obviously uh the case that we
couldn't arguably the oxyotl cells are doing computational work is that one way to put it that's uh that could be one way to put it um it it it's uh certainly it's a it's got to be a sort of 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 um you know in order to figure out literally where they are and what they have to become as a result of that um so that is a kind of computation of you know one cell communicating with those around it and and and so forth so that
could be one way of of thinking about it but we don't know the the language really of that computation other than that we we know that cells communicate with one another um in various ways they can exchange chemical signals just as they do in our synapses um uh in in in
our um in our brains um they can exchange mechanical signals so that if you tug on the membrane of a cell that can induce some the cell to do something or to grow or develop in a certain way that it wouldn't have done um otherwise and they also communicate electrically
um so not just neurons um but all cell types pretty much in in the human body have the potential to communicate with one another um to to to to sense um the elect signals that other cells can produce and to respond to those we um uh so there are these very there 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 axotal to produce you know a fully formed fully developed replacement limb 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 there's this big uh uh 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 and no one agrees uh
about this so uh and I I'm fairly agnostic on this except that I have a feeling that that 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 you know electronic circuits of of
of our laptops um but it's but you can see why that analogy is made because these the 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 uh to do likewise so
you know it looks very much like in some ways like the exchange of electrical pulses between transistors on chips um but there are there are differences um in that process as well um uh sometimes profound differences and so it's really not clear at the moment whether there is
any straightforward or even um any uh a 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 but you're an atheist doesn't it toic have to be computation so no one ever
said it had to be like a computer like I have on my desk but it's in some manner you know in the touring sense a computation well that's that's the thing it really depends on the the you know the context you're talking about I mean 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 you know particles interacting with one another and responding to one another and certainly we can develop a Quant 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 um and you know if if if uh we mean computation in that sense of uh you know simply interactions between particles then sure I think you know that's at the most fundamental level
that seems to be what we're going to find um but you know whether that means we can usefully use computational Concepts uh to try to understand uh brain circuitry is another matter entirely I mean we we you know talk in some ways we talk about them in in similar terms we talk about you know
memory and data storage and so on and I think there are absolutely analogies to be had there but whether there are whe whether there are strict formal parallels between those two processes I think is something that is it's it's 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 will whether it will help uh neuroscientists formulate theories and understanding of how the brain works I think that's still an open question tell us why you reject Richard Dawkins his
vision of The Selfish Gene as his book was titled okay I think it's actually not quite as straightforward as rejecting it you know when I was writing my book um I wanted to I I wanted to think you know clearly this has been a an extremely productive uh metaphor and way of um
portraying certainly what goes on in evolutionary biology um so I don't think it would be fair or or or proper to to Simply say well that's nonsense you know it's time to get rid of that so why you know what in what way has it been useful how to how to to to put it in the right
container I suppose and the the way I I saw it as this I'm I'm going to get you know set aside the the question of selfishness which I'll come back to in a minute whether that's a good metaphor but the idea that um that that we can essentially sort of reduce everything in
biology to what the genes are doing that is a picture that is has been very productive to evolutionary geneticists to understand how um particular mutations of genes Al as they called different variations of a given Gene how they spread in a population so if you get um an alel
arise that um the mutation of a gene that conveys some kind of um property on the organism that gives it an Adaptive Advantage Advantage you know in competition with all the others then that uh that Alo is likely to spread because that organism will have more Offspring and so on and all of that is
you know this is standard Neo darwinian Theory and all of that is is perfectly valid So within that picture a gene centered view of that process of how Al's spread um you know has been useful in that Arena the problem I have is when that comes to be seen as the the basis
for understanding everything that life is um because you know the problem with that is that there is no life in that picture it's simp le as that I think it's really interesting the the the what happens there that um the genes themselves in that picture are portrayed
as little agents and you know Richard Dawkins um more or Les explicitly does that of course he's not saying they have any you know any purposes or any um any goals or intentions or any life you know in reality but that is how they are portrayed as though they are little
organisms competing with one another with with you know with goals their goal being to to replicate as much as possible even the fact that they can replicate you know they're portrayed as being able to replicate no Gene replicates um genes are replicated they are replicated within cells by cells um
and that's an important distinction if we're going to think about you know how life works but it may not be an important distinction to make in the context of evolutionary genetics so that's really um where I uh want to sort of locate that picture of that sort of
Gene Centric view that it's a particular model and the selfish Gene metaphor is a metaphor for that particular model for 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 and in fact I it
seems fairly clear that when we're talking about genes in terms of how an organism develops and you know what the role this particular bit of the DNA seems to to to play in that development that's a a a rather different notion of a gene to this notion of The Selfish
Gene you know in a pool of different alals um replicating um The evolutionary Gene and the developmental Gene aren't necessarily the same thing and 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 you know what they really do and what our um what our DNA does and what the the different sequences of DNA do we find that what we think of as genes seem to overlap there are some things that we call pseudo genes that maybe once were genes and aren't any longer but maybe
they can come back as genes there are regions outside the the the the 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 um so and and also within that picture I think the question of selfishness is important because you
know the selfishness refers to the tendency of a particular Gene variant an alil 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 and they have to work
together to make an organism so they're not competing with each other the gene that produces um you know one enzyme isn't competing with a gene that produces is you know at some other enzyme um they they have to work together so they're Cooperative so I think that that selfish metaphor isn't
saying anything about what genes do biochemically it's talking about that particular model but say I want to defend the gene centered view it seems to me that crisper 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 right we're just not surprised at what we get isn't that evidence that the gene centered view while maybe incomplete in predictive terms is really doing very
well like what would be a prediction your biological ecosystem view has in those cases that the gene centered view would not have I well I don't I don't sort of see it as a I mean this isn't some rival to that uh to that position this is an expression of what we have
and an attempt to to summarize what we have learned over the past 10 or 20 30 years since the human Geno project really about the way uh life really functions and within that it's absolutely Beyond question that genes have a a a central role to play of course they do they are you know that's
they are the things that we that we inherit from one generation to the next and it's absolutely the case as you say that we can use use now a gene editing technique like crisper and we're getting better ones now more accurate ones even we can use that to address some diseases
um that are caused by a gene mutation so it's been used for example to uh to to uh cure CLE cell anemia which it comes about because of a gene a mutation to to one particular Gene it's possible that it might be used for for things like cystic fibrosis for which that is also
true all of uh applications are for diseases that are in CLE cell anemia maybe this is less so but most of them uh most of them are rare and they are caused by they are traced back to I should perhaps say just one particular gene or maybe you know might be a couple of genes they're
monogenic in those situations we can edit that Gene um whether in principle in the embryo or sometimes in the adult body as being done in in si cell anemia we can make that edit and we can have a predictable response on the whole a predictable response um uh from that
edit so that's absolutely true because the uh the the the condition is being caused by a single Gene most of the health conditions that concern you know the the developed world uh most in fact that concern the entire world um you know heart conditions um obesity diabetes um as well as most as well as
just about all the traits the physical traits we have you know height and intelligence and so on um cannot be traced back to just one or two genes they seem to be correlated with so differences in in in different individuals seem to be correlated with differences in the genetic profile of
many genes sometimes hundreds sometimes even thousands of genes so you know a significant part of the the of our total complement of genes um so that's um you know that that is what is what's become clear and that is why it's not at all clear that uh techniques like crisper
Gene editing are going to be at all useful to address um uh uh diseases like that not only because you'd have so many targets you'd have to try to hit and you going to get some of Target um hits and you know that's going to cause problems but 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 and so 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 and so
what we need to understand is not to identify the genes and think we can address the problem there because or the you know the condition there because it's arising at some other level in the organism at a higher level in in somehow in the way all these genes are interacting with each other and with the
other components of the Genome of 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 and so it's there that we need to be thinking about intervening
that's really the the the one of the messages that I'm wanting to try to get across in the book so 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 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 understanding of how that condition how that trait is coming about that's a more complex business that I'm
trying to kind of tease apart in my book I some general questions about science for you so I read Carl 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 I mean are these useful ideas or are they just semantic
reorganizations or scientists picking up on this what's the status of all this work uh so this is the um the so-called free energy principle that yeah that Carl friston um I guess Carl is a neuroscientist at at UCL here has been uh Central proponent of and I I 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 um a very interesting idea and a lot of neuroscientists are f are looking into ways in which they might be able to use this idea to formulate and maybe even to answer questions um and you know it is
something that can be formalized there is a a mathematical theory behind it um but others have said and I think this is a this is a common um complaint I might have about um these kind of in some ways they tend to be sort of theories of of everything or you know 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 you know 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 and so you know I think at the moment it feels to me as though it's at the stage of an 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 um uh in in in Neuroscience or elsewhere or maybe even computer science um to to you know to see whether it's going to be useful but I but but I you know I applaud the uh
the fact that we we are we we have theories like this that a very General theories that are trying to understand something like in this case um Carl thinks that it's uh in some sense it can be considered a generalized theory of agency and whether or not that's true I
think that a generalized theory of agency is absolutely something that uh that science needs 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
I well I mean whether I I haven't followed the work on whether it whether they're accumulating the testicles it would be certainly concerning if that was the case and there has been you know discussions about whether plastic pollution has some kind of role in what we seem to see as a declining as a
decline in in Sp male in sperm C in male fertility but but in the more General sense microplastics are Absolut there's there's clear evidence that it's a problem that you see them everywhere you see them you know in the Antarctic you see them in marine organisms um uh so it
it it's very clear that that you know they're now a global pollution problem and one what's the harm to me as a body I I don't think we know yet actually I mean you know I I I I think that's that that's the problem that it's you know it's maybe still too early to know um to
what extent that's going to be a problem I mean I can't help feeling that any uh any substance that doesn't break down that simply accumulates in the body this way that doesn't sound like a you know something that you want to have happening in your bodies and in your
tissues it's also um you know sometimes um suggested that some of the additives the plasticizers that are added to Plastics like this can uh function a little bit they look chemically or a little bit like um certain hormones and they so they can mimic hormones and induce hormonal changes in the body and
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 Michael web 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 the 1960s we now have many more
women in science so has there been this radical slowdown in the pace of actual Discovery per scientist not in absolute terms but per worker like are are are scientists today per worker just much worse just worse more more yeah good question there have been um some studies
that have tried to quantify this and there have been suggestions that actually um transformational discoveries um seem to be slowing down more recently I mean that seems a bit of an odd thing to say in this age of you know we' talked about AI but also um biotechnologies some of
the biotechnologies that are you know appearing today are so incredibly powerful and transformative um but uh I mean I I guess I I I'd say first of all that it's not entirely obvious that we can expect to see um advances in scientific understanding relating to productivity growth it depends what
science we're doing you know certainly if we're trying to understand the topology of the universe say we can't expect to see much you know return commercial return from from from that and certainly not directly but I think that what what I do see uh happening is that the increasing
um the expansion of science really that maybe it is in to some extent a victim of its own success that you see um a a the institutionalization the increasing institutionalization of science I think sometimes um 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 a what you might think as a a more um a high-risk Frontier of of research it becomes harder for them to do that becomes harder for them to find funding becomes harder for to get their papers
uh published because of this this this increasing caution that so there's a sort of what statist statisticians might say a regression to the mean everything becomes a little bit more mediocre and safe and 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 shortterm commercial return on um on scientific research um and that you know perhaps
gives rise to a greater timidity in what science is is is is being permitted so I think that that that does seem to be a problem um you know I think it's it's hard to know what to expect I have to say because one could also argue well we we've got all the lwh hanging fruit
right you know all the sort of easier stuff to figure out about how the world works and about what things to make we've kind of done that um and now we're on to the really hard stuff um so you know who it's sort of 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 but it's um but they you know they seem to be incredibly hard ones questions like what is consciousness which you know we don't even know of science will ever really answer that whether it's a philosophical
question um but but uh but it's Poss that part of that decline in science is because we're looking at more challenging problems now last set of questions is about you what's your favorite science fiction book oh that's a very nice question I um I don't read as much science fiction as I used to but
I used to be I I read all of Philip K Dick's books really in my in my younger years and I think they were they they had that kind of Mythic quality that I you know found in those older myths that I talked about um and I also devoured The Works of of JG Ballard which I was
very interesting to me how back in those days balad was just kind of dismissed as a genre writer a science fiction writer you know and he never had any proper characters and so forth and these days balad is seen as a total Visionary as he you know clearly is he saw so much of
what was coming back in the 1960s so I I would um certainly name those two as as two of my favorite science fiction writers 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 uh what advice do you give or what is it they should know that maybe they don't know because you've done it yeah well I I guess I I did it back in the day when one could just kind of wander randomly into it as I did whereas these days it's much more
professionalized and I think that's bet that's very good that you can now you know 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 sort of messy way so you know I absolutely think that that would be
something I would recommend get a training in science journalism um because some of them are very good they will equip you to 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 um because I mean it's the same for any writer actually you know 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 and I think certainly for for book writing um
it feels to me like you have to have something to say it's you're not it's not enough there to just do a translation job of a difficult field you want to you you really need to have something to bring to it some insight to bring to it so figure out what it is you
want to say and figure out what kind of voice you want to say it in and and 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 so with someone who's written about 30 science books and most of them have more
than one thing to say like what tradeit is it in you that has given rise to you having so many things to say relative to so many of your peers well I what's the sauce in Philip Paul secret s I'd hesitate to put it that way when somebody of my peers are do such a fantastic job but I think um I
I think for me what it is is um 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 and so it is I've always felt given that opportunity I'm you know I've got really want to make
the best use of it that I can and so I want to continually be finding out about new topics to take that opportunity to discover something entirely new so there are some writers not just in science who think 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 you know if that's if you clearly want to do that but for me it's it's just such a wonderful opportunity to express my and you know give free reign to my curiosity to find out about these new topics and
they they they pop up they suggest themselves with you know I I would never have imagined myself you know 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 um so you know that's the kind of thing that I
look for I I'm I'm waiting for um the sort of Penny to drop of aha I can see something new in here there's and and this is an area that I'm going to be enriched by spending two or three years finding out about before I pose my last question just again your latest book how life
works user's guide to the new biology final query what will you do next ah now that that I have to keep under wraps well I've I've just had a book deal pretty much agreed and I'm I'm going to keep that under wraps for now but I can what I can tell you is next next um that is the book that is going
to come out later this year which I've already written um it's just it's a relatively short book because it's highly Illustrated I've done one or two others um of this sort with the same uh publisher and it's an illustrated history of alchemy uh so that's what I've been
writing since finishing how life works I've had a fantastic as I knew I would have 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 so an illustrated history of alchemy Philip ball thank you very much thank you