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one interesting thing to me about Bateson is he seems to have a pretty positive view of Lamarck. Lamarck is a precursor to Darwin and he believed that evolutionary change occurred by way of organisms changing in their lives and passing those changes to their offspring.

One hypothetical example of this involves Giraffes. The idea is that Giraffes reaching up for leaves in trees stretch their necks and that process leads to offspring with progressively longer necks. And, voila, long necky boyos!

Of course in that example, and a lot of examples, it's wrong, but he isn't completely wrong. Epigenetics is a real thing and, if you were to get even higher/more abstract, organisms construct the environments that their offspring inherit.

I don't know how people tend to think of Lamarck nowadays, most people probably just don't, but it's still so interesting to see him thought about so positively for his really important contribution to evolutionary theory.

I like the way the argument is framed and the descriptions of the collection of macroscopic processes that operate in order for the earth to facilitate life. That being said, I don't buy the notion that the earth is a superorganism that has anything in line with the idea of intention. I just don't know exactly what that'd mean or how it operates. Also it seems like Gaia is a superorganism whose intention/role is regulating the earth(/itself) to maintain the conditions for carbon-based life.

It seems like a weird basis for calling something alive, especially considering the motivations of other living systems are their own survival, the flourishing of offspring, the acquisition and consumption of resources. That seems very different motivationally than just "keep good for carbon-based life."

I still really like the book though, and I think that the outlook of a person who believed in the Gaia Hypothesis would be pretty agreeable.

I am of two minds about Steps. To begin with, I think Bateson's a very interesting thinker and it's always interesting to read perspectives of social and biological phenomena that are deeply steeped in information theory. There are also a few specific quotes from it that really appeal to me and get at aspects of my perspective or how I would like to think about the world.

That being said, Steps is also pretty clunky and feels very redundant. It's a collection of other, shorter works like essays, conference papers, etc. That's not a bad thing, in a lot of ways that format is incredibly accessible and less tiring, but the problem I'm having is that a lot of his works are about the same topic and it feels like there was very little/no discrimination in terms of choosing them. I am on the 3 of 5 essays explicitly titled to be about Schizophrenia and the concept of the Double Bind.

The ideas are interesting, but I kind of wish that the approach had been more discriminatory or they were ordered in such a way as to not be such a slog.