Gregory Bateson's contribution to 20th century thinking has appealed to scholars from a wide range of fields dealing in one way or another with aspects of communication and epistemology. A number of his insights were taken up and developed further in anthropology, psychology, evolutionary biology and communication theory. But the large, trans-disciplinary synthesis that, in his own mind, was his major contribution to science received little attention from the mainstream scientific communities.

This book represents a major attempt to revise this deficiency. Scholars from ecology, biochemistry, evolutionary biology, cognitive science, anthropology and philosophy discuss how Bateson's thinking might lead to a fruitful reframing of central problems in modern science. Most important perhaps, Bateson's bioanthropology is shown to play a key role in developing the set of ideas explored in the new field of biosemiotics. The idea that organismic life is indeed basically semiotic or communicative lies at the heart of the biosemiotic approach to the study of life.

The only book of its kind, this volume provides a key resource for the quickly-growing substratum of scholars in the biosciences, philosophy and medicine who are seeking an elegant new approach to exploring highly complex systems.

"What pattern connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose and all the four of them to me? And me to you?"

• Gregory Bateson from Mind and Nature

  Inhalt
  Introduction: Bateson the Precursor.- Angels Fear Revisited: Gregory Bateson's Cybernetic Theory of Mind Applied to Religion-Science Debates.- From Thing to Relation. On Bateson's Bioanthropology.- What Connects the Map to the Territory?.- The Pattern Which Connects Pleroma to Creatura: The Autocell Bridge from Physics to Life.- Bateson's Method: Double Description. What is It? How Does It Work? What Do We Learn?.- Gregory Bateson's Relevance to Current Molecular Biology.- Process Ecology: Creatura at Large in an Open Universe.- Connections in Action Bridging Implicit and Explicit Domains.- Bateson: Biology with Meaning.- Gregory Bateson's Uncovery Of Ecological Aesthetics.- Collapsing the Wave Function of Meaning: The Epistemological Matrix of Talk-in-Interaction.- Re-Enchanting Evolution: Transcending Fundamentalisms through a Mythopoeic Epistemology.- Bateson and Peirce on the Pattern that Connects and the Sacred.- Bateson, Peirce, and the Sign of the Sacred.