Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology

Bateson reflects on evolutionary thought, particularly the idea of the origin of order in the universe. He contrasts the anti-evolutionary stance of California’s State Board of Education with broader perspectives on the problem of sorting and separation—a concept central to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Bateson also examines creation stories, such as the Biblical account of Genesis and the Iatmul tribe’s myth of Kavwokmali.

Bateson discusses the historical Great Chain of Being, a medieval framework that places Supreme Mind at the top and protozoa at the bottom. This concept was overturned by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who proposed an evolutionary sequence starting from simple organisms, making the nature of Mind itself a problem for scientific explanation.

Bateson critiques the narrow approach of evolution in schools, and advocates for a broader exploration of historical theories. He also critiques the shallow understanding of evolution adopted by biology, advocating instead for the exploration of historical and alternative theories. He offers Philip Henry Gosse’s Creation (1857) as an example, which he believes reconciles fundamentalist beliefs with scientific observations by proposing that God created a world with an apparent past (344). Bateson urges students to engage with such paradoxes, arguing that evolutionary theory is enriched by examining its conceptual lineage and ecological interdependence, instead of reducing debates to simplistic dichotomies of right and wrong.