Bateson: Biology with Meaning

Nature and culture have been sharply separated in modern thought. A major reason for this is the belief that language and meaning apply to humans and culture, but not to the evolution of species generally. However, recent studies in post-genomic biology on the structure of proteomes, on genetic and metabolic networks, are leading to a new perspective on the nature of the processes involved in reading and expressing the information in the genome. These are beginning to be recognised as having the network properties of a language, so that a reading of the genetic text by an organism is a process that makes meaning of the text through the self-construction of the organism. The members of a species are then participants in a culture with a language. They make meaning of their inherited texts by generating a form (a distinctive morphology and behaviour pattern) that is dependent on both genetic text and external context. This understanding of development and evolution arises from experimental observation and mathematical modelling, and leads to an extended conceptual context for understanding living processes. Biology is finally catching up with Bateson’s (1979) view of organisms and natural creativity, which was that nature and culture are one, a necessary unity, not two.