BATESON: Sometimes for good reasons. Some of the processes that underlie pain, sensation and coping with environmental challenges are very conservative in evolutionary terms, and although our cognitive abilities must have increased enormously over the last two million years, other aspects of our behavior are probably very much the same as those of other animals. Of course, I could say to you that I only know about my own awareness, and I shall never have access to your awareness or your capacity to suffer. But that kind of solipsism would be rather foolish. It would be more appropriate to ask what aspects of your behavior and what aspects of the design of your body suggest to me that you are like me? If I specify the criteria that lead me to such an inference, I can apply them to other animals. People do that intuitively. They do other less reasonable things, of course; they project their feelings into teddy bears and other inanimate things. But sometimes it is rational to treat animals as though they had some human properties.

JB: I know you've been concerned with how animals and humans become what they are and how their behavior develops, and that's been the basis of a lot of your research. You seem to be able to describe in understandable language processes which many people find very complicated.

BATESON: Some people see the process of growth and development as very simple. They seem to think it is read out of the genes, and that when the human genome project is completed we shall have the Book of Life, which will give us a complete an understanding of all human nature. Others take the view that the developmental process is so immensely complicated that we shall never understand it properly. I take the view that, although on the surface developmental processes may look complicated, the underlying rules are analogous to those that underlie a game like chess. The rules of chess are simple, but the games that can be generated by those rules are enormously complex. What we have to do as scientists is try to understand rules that produce a design for a life.

JB: How do you understand them?