Signals from the Goal
Signals from the Goal
This chapter places Bateson's work with dolphins within a broader 1960s "dolphin mystique"--a cultural site where anxieties over modern science’s physical models went unresolved. Most associated with scientist John C. Lilly, the dolphin mystique had futurist, utilitarian, and romantic components, also found in a similar "outer space mystique." The chapter shows how Lilly's and Bateson's research goals differed through a further substantiation of the sources of Bateson's thought: the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics (his theory of play, the concepts of positive feedback, negative feedback, servomechanisms, and the naturalization of teleology); and his father William Bateson and his career amid the ongoing conflict between Darwinist and Lamarckian theories of evolution. In Hawaii, Bateson expressed his isolation from potential peers and research frustrations in letters to old friend and Darwin granddaughter/scholar Nora Barlow. This isolation, however, allowed Bateson to articulate a justification for scientific inquiry that was neither utilitarian nor a value-neutral pursuit of truth, but an effort to establish an accurate depiction of the relationship between nature and the human self, which he called the riddle of the Sphinx.
Keywords: dolphin mystique, John C. Lilly, Macy Conferences on Cybernetics, theory of play, feedback, servomechanism, William Bateson, Nora Barlow, riddle of the Sphinx, theory of evolution
North Carolina Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
