BATESON: No, we're not talking about hard-wiring, but what we could be talking about is experience which impinges on the child in a particular stage in development, and which may have long-lasting effects, because it's mediated through the subsequent relationships experienced by the child. In terms of biological function, however, the process is well-regulated and leads to the typical outcome that siblings are not sexually interested in each other. That is good design.

JB: How do you feel about the nature-nurture debate? How do the various influences on development work together.

BATESON: First of all, I dislike the opposition of nature and nurture, implying that there are two set processes that independently affect the development of behavior. I am skeptical about the attempt to try to partition the adult behavioral characteristics into those things which might be due to genetic variance and those things which might be due to environmental variance. Also I think it distracts from attention to the interplay between developing individuals and their environments. In Design For a Life, Paul Martin and I use the metaphor of cooking to make the point that if you have a large number of cakes, to say that 50% of the differences between these cakes is due to the ingredients and 50% is due to the way in which they're cooked is not likely to make any sense. We all understand that cooking is chemistry and has many surprising outcomes. We now need to understand that development is chemistry and the end-product cannot simply be reduced to its ingredients.

A quite different point is this. When we think about development, it is very easy to suppose that what we see in the young is all part of assembling an adult. But individuals must survive to become adults and they have to deal with habitats which they will never experience again. For the child in the womb, that ecology is totally different from what happens afterwards. Later, when the child is taking milk from its mother and is dependent on her, its environment is quite different from what it will encounter at the next stage. And so on, all through life. This makes the point that many aspects of juvenile behavior are not part of the process of assembly, but are part of what is necessary to survive through a particular stage.

JB: Opportunistic development? Seizing the moment?

BATESON: No, that is a different matter. The young are like caterpillars. They have to cope with the problems of that particular stage in life and these may be very different from being an adult butterfly.

JB: Are you endorsing spending a lot of time and attention to pre-school age children?