Gregory Bateson is a prominent 20th-century thinker, philosopher, ecologist, cyberneticist and systems theorist who made significant contributions to anthropology, psychiatry and communication theory. Bateson's discoveries and theories formed the basis of such cutting-edge movements as "systemic" family therapy and neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). Mind and Nature (1979), completed by Bateson shortly before his death, sums up his efforts to create a new epistemology that is emerging from cybernetics, genetics and evolutionary theory. He believed that this epistemology should serve as the basis for a future synthetic science of living things, which he called “ecology of mind.”