Eating people we know to be wrong. Is making people  cloning them, incubating them in test tubes, or moulding protoplasm to amend the human form, rather than relying on a tadpole to find a congenial egg  just as much of an abomination? Begetting a child the old-fashioned way remains a pleasant pastime, but giving birth is hard labour, so those who can afford it can now hire others to trudge around for months with a restive lodger inside their bellies and to spend painful hours in the hospital pushing it out.

In vitro fertilisation, as Philip Ball points out in his history of "anthropoeia"  or people-making  is only the newest form of a heretical activity that has been going on for centuries. Human beings have always experimented with manufacturing replicas of themselves. Art and technology aim to challenge and transcend natural limitations: our ingenious species resents the idea of a creator with the exclusive right to instigate life.

The boldest modern myth is that of Frankenstein, the scientist who stitches together gobbets of corpses on an operating table and reanimates them with the help of electricity. In Mary Shelley's story he is the descendant of Prometheus, the Titan whose creatures were sculpted from mud and infused with a divine spark stolen from the hearth of Zeus. That ancient offence remains unforgiven, so that when Pope John Paul II questioned the ethics of biomedical research, he castigated the "Promethean ambitions" of science. The pope's intervention was absurd and perhaps hypocritical: after all, what sleight of hand smuggled Christ into the womb of Mary, the first and most sanctimoniously virginal of surrogate mothers? A 17th-century Spanish bishop, puzzling over that bizarre event, suggested that Christ's body must have been formed from menstrual blood without the admixture of semen, since God the Father would hardly have cuckolded a humble carpenter like Joseph; Mary's uterus therefore served as one of the hermetically sealed vessels in which medieval alchemists experimentally concocted life. The antenatal Jesus, Ball suspects, was an artificial man, the kind of tiny but perfectly formed freak that alchemists called a homunculus.

Ball's book is a museum of such oddities. The Greek inventor Daedalus  honoured by James Joyce as the patron and symbolic parent of all artists  pandered to the lustful Pasiphae by building an artificial cow that allowed her to mate with a bull. Medieval magicians cobbled together automata from metal, wax, glass and leather, and set them to perform household chores. In the 18th century, a lapsed monk called Vaucanson, who spent his time in the cloisters manufacturing androids, constructed a mechanical duck that gobbled up food, pretended to digest it, then excreted a pre-prepared green pulp. Thomas Edison planned a mass-produced progeny of talking dolls, with miniature gramophones hidden in their guts. In the 1920s, the dramatist Karel Capek imagined a workforce of purpose-built drudges to which he gave the name robot, a neologism adapted from the Czech word for labourer. Their bodies are cold inorganic steel, but they mimic the human prototype by being fitted with tonsils, appendices and unfunctional genitalia: a fussy oddity perhaps, but  as Ball cheekily jokes  God created Adam with a spurious navel.

Stranger than sci-fi, Unnatural deals with the extravagant fictionality of science itself. Advancing through history, Ball notes that the recipes for artificially engendering life act out prevalent theories of what life is. Classical materialists such as Lucretius saw the world as a "fecund matrix", so the ancient model for making life was the spawning of maggots in a dead body or the quickening of insentient metals. The industrial era assumed that the secret of life was electrical: hence Frankenstein's harnessing of a lightning bolt, which in James Whale's 1931 film jolts the monster into motion. Darwin replaced Eden with a "warm little pond" in which chemicals, coming together in a fortuitous jelly, were responsible for the origins of our species. Now we are in what Ball calls "the genomic era", when the book of life has been digitalised and squeezed into the DNA molecule, which contains "some 30,000100,000 stories, known as genes", roughly as many as the verses in the Bible. Chemicals encode the instructions issued by those genes, and tissues can be cultivated by using a technology resembling that devised for ink-jet printers. Life is today equated with information, although it is good to be told by Ball that nature cannot be reduced to "a librarian or a computer programmer", nerdily fiddling with the algorithms that determine our character and conduct.

Unnatural is an exploration of such metaphors, and it demonstrates that scientific conjecture depends on imagination and that nature is shaped by our creative intelligence and improved by our technical skills. Shakespeare and Goethe are as important here as biologists like Julian Huxley or Francis Crick; Ball's previous books, along with a "biography of water" and an anatomy of the elements in the periodic table, include a study of Chartres Cathedral and a much-admired homily in praise of music. On this evidence, the two cultures of science and art are not antagonists, divergent in their aims and mutually unintelligible: they happily cohabit inside Ball's compendious, eclectic head.

The award of the Nobel prize, when it came in October 2010, was long overdue. By then there was more than three decades' worth of growing evidence to back up the claim of two British men. Around 4 million people, none older than 33, were living proof of their pioneering work in developing the technique of in vitro fertilisation (IVF). Sadly for the gynaecologist and surgeon Dr Patrick Steptoe, who died in 1988, the Nobel isn't awarded posthumously. Therefore the sole recipient was the physiologist Professor Robert Edwards, who at 85 was too ill to travel to Stockholm to collect the prize in person.

Since the birth of Louise Brown on 25 July 1978, IVF has helped and offered hope to some of the 10% of all couples worldwide who suffer from infertility. Yet the birth of the "first test tube baby" at Oldham General hospital outraged many for being the product of an unnatural interference by scientists in the creation of a human being. Repeatedly having to fend off charges that he was playing God, Edwards once complained that the early public response to IVF was conditioned by "fantasies of horror and disaster, and visions of white-coated, heartless men, breeding and rearing embryos in the laboratory to bring forth Frankenstein genetic monsters".

Philip Ball, who in Critical Mass explored how one thing leads to another, points out in his latest book, Unnatural, that traditionally the "natural" end of sex is procreation since the latter requires the former. However, religious objections to IVF, Ball argues, invoke this reasoning in reverse: the natural beginning of procreation is sex  not sex in terms of sperm meets egg, but in the anatomical sense. Hence, Ball's interest in exploring what lies beyond the "this bit goes in here" method. The result is a fascinating and impressive cultural history of anthropoeia  the centuries of myths and tales about the artificial creation of people.

Ball explores what these fables reveal about contemporary views on life, humanity and technology as modern science has turned the fantasy of making people into reality. From the homunculus of the medieval alchemists and the clay golem of Jewish legend to Frankenstein's monster and the babies in jars of Huxley's Brave New World, Ball ranges far and wide to show that the idea that making life is either hubristic or "unnatural" is a relatively recent one.

Until the Enlightenment, it was widely assumed that it was possible to make lower forms of life. For example, a process called bougonia in which bees were created using the carcasses of dead oxen was once accepted as fact. It was only in the 19th century that "spontaneous generation", the belief that life could spring forth from inanimate matter without the need for seeds, eggs or parents, was finally discredited. If there were any doubts about such practices, explains Ball, then they were about the quality and character of "artificial life"  was it inferior, equivalent, or better than "natural" life?

The ultimate "unnatural" act is the artificial creation of humans, since it challenges the conviction that we are God's chosen. Yet Ball makes a persuasive case when he suggests that the response of the medieval mind to the idea of artificial human life was very different from the horror it now typically engenders. This indicates that feelings of revulsion about these "unnatural" creations are not inevitable.

The prefix "un" was only attached to acts that were deemed reprehensible because they were contra naturam, against nature. However, people in the middle ages saw nothing intrinsically wrong in creating human and other forms of life. The problem for them was rather, as the 12th-century Muslim scholar Averroes said, that organisms made by art were like alchemist's gold, a kind of fake. In short, any "unnatural" creation lacked a soul.

Doubts about the possibility of an artificial person having a soul are still with us, though given a modern spin. The fabricated being is denied genuine humanity. He or she is thought to be soulless: lacking in love, warmth and human feeling. This same failing is now imputed to human clones  21st-century reincarnations of Frankenstein's monster, as the very term carries connotations of spiritual vacancy. A skilled practitioner of the book-length essay, Ball can also be wonderfully succinct: "'Soul' has become a kind of watermark of humanity, a defence against the awful thought that we could be manufactured."

Debates about the pros and cons of human embryo research, cloning and the like require a focus on issues that are rooted in the particularities of our time and culture. Ball's thoughtful book is a reminder that as we try and deal with how to enable and assist people into being, we need to understand and then conquer our fears surrounding the very idea of making people.

Manjit Kumar's books include Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality (Icon).