Yes. And the same Stafford Beer who wanted to build a computer out of a goddamn pond.

Beer also reported attempts to induce small organisms, Daphnia collected from a local pond, to ingest iron fillings so that input and output couplings to them could be achieved via magnetic fields, and another attempt to use a population of the protozoon Euglena via optical couplings. Beer’s last attempt in this series was to use not specific organisms but an entire pond ecosystem as a homeostatic controller.

Sounds like it. He was into cybernetics and systems theory, anyways.