It is of first-class importance that our answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx should be in step with how we conduct our civilisation, and this should in turn be in step with the actual workings of living systems.

Creatura and Pleroma. Bateson's encounter with Mead on the Sepik river (Chapter 16) and their life together in Bali (Chapter 17) is described in Mead's autobiography "Blackberry Winter – My Earlier Years" (Angus and Robertson. He died on Independence Day 1980 at the age of 76 in the guest house of the San Francisco Zen Center.

In the 1940s he helped extend systems theory/cybernetics to the social/behavioral sciences and spent the last decade of his life developing a "meta-science" of epistemology to bring together the various early forms of systems theory developing in various fields of science. Some of his most noted writings are to be found in his books Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) and Mind and Nature (1979).