author
W. P. (William Platt) Ball
1844–1917
A Victorian freethinker and former schoolmaster, he wrote clear, combative books on religion, politics, and evolution. His best-known work weighs in on one of Darwinism’s most argued questions: whether acquired traits can be inherited.
1 Audiobook
Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited? An Examination of the View Held by Spencer and Darwin
by W. P. (William Platt) Ball
About the author
Born in 1844, William Platt Ball was an English schoolmaster who later became known as a writer and freethinker. Sources connected with his books describe him as a teacher who retired to work with The Freethinker, the British secularist journal founded by G. W. Foote.
Ball wrote across several controversial subjects of his day, including religion, socialism, and evolutionary theory. His works include Christian Murderers, Mrs. Besant's Socialism: An Examination and an Exposure, and Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited?, a study of the debate around Spencer, Darwin, and the inheritance of acquired characteristics.
He died in 1917. Today he is remembered less as a literary stylist than as a lively popular polemicist: a writer who tried to make big scientific and philosophical arguments accessible to general readers.