Gregory Bateson

Gregory Bateson was an English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist whose work crossed many fields. His books include Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) and Mind and Nature (1979), and in Palo Alto, California, he and his colleagues developed the double-bind theory of schizophrenia. Systems theory ran as a thread through his career: he was an original member of the core group of the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics from 1941 to 1960 and of its later Group Processes series from 1954 to 1960, where he represented the social and behavioral sciences and pursued his interest in the relationship between these fields and epistemology; his association with the editor and author Stewart Brand helped widen his influence further.