14 Jun ’07
The 100th Monkey
Something I heard come up about a thousand times before, as it is a fairly popular story.. and as I am a biologist, my expert opinion ;) is requested *cough*. To stop the embarrassment of knowing nothing more than the story itself, I took it upon myself to study the story in a bit more detail..
But first, a summary of the hundredth monkey story:
THE STORY OF "The Hundredth Monkey" has recently become popular in our culture as a strategy for social change. Lyall Watson first told it in Lifetide (pp147- 148), but its most widely known version is the opening to the book The Hundredth Monkey, by Ken Keyes. (See below.) The story is based on research with monkeys on a northern Japanese Island, and its central idea is that when enough individuals in a population adopt a new idea or behavior, there occurs an ideological breakthrough that allows this new awareness to be communicated directly from mind to mind without the connection of external experience and then all individuals in the population spontaneously adopt it. "It may be that when enough of us hold something to be true, it becomes true for everyone." (Watson, p148)
The complete version of this article, including references to the original scientific articles that appeared in "Primates", is at the end of this post, but I will set out my own thoughts first
Problem 1: facts don't report any mind-to-mind jumps of information
The 100th monkey story assumes that given the choice, a monkey would prefer to wash his potato before eating it. However, within the initial population of monkeys, where the monkeys could just observe each others behavior, the washing behavior spread very slowly. More precisely, it seemed that it was mostly the young monkeys that were open enough to innovations to pick up the washing behavior. The behavior wasn't recorded to jump over to other islands.
So the monkey story is completely disconnected from the morphic resonance idea. But lets turn towards the idea for a moment:
Problem 2: logics behind Morphic Resonance.
As hinted at by Elaine Myers (also highlighted in the text below), the concept of Morphic Resonance must allow for new ideas to exist, despite the overwhelming morphic resonance field of an older, competing idea, in order to prevent new and original ideas to be immediately squashed by the billions of human monkeys that disagree with it. An example would be a scholar with the idea that the earth is round, rather than flat. The oldest recollection of this idea is from India in the 8th-9th century before christ, Later recollections of this idea are from Greece in the 1st century before Christ (wikipedia link). Any scholar with this idea would be swamped and instantly converted by the collective force of the rest of the human population that firmly believed that the world was flat.
Two options exist: either by some ranking order amongst ideas, 'better ideas' are not instantly squashed, and thus are allowed to take over the world, or ideas are being transferred through this field, but the choice of applying them still rests with the individual. The former seems to have been the suggestion made in the hundred monkey story. The fallacy in the story seems to be that it is inherently assumed that washing your food is definitely better than eating it dust-covered, but `what is better' very much depends on your point of view.
In conclusion: the story of the 100th monkey can be rephrased into the hypothesis that once an idea exists in a collective consciousness, that information can be accessed more easily through tapping into that collective consciousness in a way that is currently unknown for science. Interestingly enough, this idea is fairly well testable,if you have a number of subpopulations of a particular species, put them into a situation where they have the chance to learn a new behaviour, and see if the number of populations that discovered the new behaviour increases exponentially over time. It might be easier to use something else than monkeys though. Ants perhaps?
--------
http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC09/Myers.htm
THE STORY OF "The Hundredth Monkey" has recently become popular in our culture as a strategy for social change. Lyall Watson first told it in Lifetide (pp147- 148), but its most widely known version is the opening to the book The Hundredth Monkey, by Ken Keyes. (See below.) The story is based on research with monkeys on a northern Japanese Island, and its central idea is that when enough individuals in a population adopt a new idea or behavior, there occurs an ideological breakthrough that allows this new awareness to be communicated directly from mind to mind without the connection of external experience and then all individuals in the population spontaneously adopt it. "It may be that when enough of us hold something to be true, it becomes true for everyone." (Watson, p148)
I found this to be a very appealing and believable idea. The concept of Jung's collective unconscious, and the biologists' morphogenetic fields offer parallel stories that help strengthen this strand of our imaginations. Archetypes, patterns, or fields that are themselves without mass or energy, could shape the individual manifestations of mass and energy. The more widespread these fields are, the greater their influence on the physical level of reality. We sometimes mention the Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon when we need supporting evidence of the possibility of an optimistic scenario for the future, especially a future based on peace instead of war. If enough of us will just think the right thoughts, then suddenly, almost magically, such ideas will become reality.
However, when I went back to the original research reports cited by Watson, I did not find the same story that he tells. Where he claims to have had to improvise details, the research reports are quite precise, and they do not support the "ideological breakthrough" phenomenon. At first I was disappointed; but as I delved deeper into the research I found a growing appreciation for the lessons the real story of these monkeys has for us. Based on what I have learned from the Japan Monkey Center reports in Primates, vol. 2, vol. 5 and vol. 6, here is how the real story seems to have gone.
Up until 1958, Keyes' description follows the research quite closely, although not all the young monkeys in the troop learned to wash the potatoes. By March, 1958, 15 of the 19 young monkeys (aged two to seven years} and 2 of the 11 adults were washing sweet potatoes. Up to this time, the propagation of the innovative behavior was on an individual basis, along family lines and playmate relationships. Most of the young monkeys began to wash the potatoes when they were one to two and a half years old. Males older than 4 years, who had little contact with the young monkeys, did not acquire the behavior.
By 1959, the sweet potato washing was no longer a new behavior to the group. Monkeys that had acquired the behavior as juveniles were growing up and having their own babies. This new generation of babies learned sweet potato washing behavior through the normal cultural pattern of the young imitating their mothers. By January, 1962, almost all the monkeys in the Koshima troop, excepting those adults born before 1950, were observed to be washing their sweet potatoes. If an individual monkey had not started to wash sweet potatoes by the time he was an adult, he was unlikely to learn it later, regardless of how widespread it became among the younger members of the troop.
In the original reports, there was no mention of the group passing a critical threshold that would impart the idea to the entire troop. The older monkeys remained steadfastly ignorant of the new behavior. Likewise, there was no mention of widespread sweet potato washing in other monkey troops. There was mention of occasional sweet potato washing by individual monkeys in other troops, but I think there are other simpler explanations for such occurrences. If there was an Imo in one troop, there could be other Imo-like monkeys in other troops.
Instead of an example of the spontaneous transmission of ideas, I think the story of the Japanese monkeys is a good example of the propagation of a paradigm shift, as in Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The truly innovative points of view tend to come from those on the edge between youth and adulthood. The older generation continues to cling to the world view they grew up with. The new idea does not become universal until the older generation withdraws from power, and a younger generation matures within the new point of view.
It is also an example of the way that simple innovations can lead to extensive cultural change. By using the water in connection with their food, the Koshima monkeys began to exploit the sea as a resource in their environment. Sweet potato washing led to wheat washing, and then to bathing behavior and swimming, and the utilization of sea plants and animals for food. "Therefore, provisioned monkeys suffered changes in their attitude and value system and were given foundations on which pre-cultural phenomena developed." (M Kawai, Primates, Vol 6, #1, 1965).
What does this say about morphogenetic fields, and the collective unconscious? Not very much, but the "ideological breakthrough" idea is not what Sheldrake's theory of morphogenetic fields would predict anyway. That theory would recognize that the behavior of the older monkeys (not washing) also is a well-established pattern. There may well be a "critical mass" required to shift a new behavior from being a fragile personal idiosyncrasy to being a well-established alternative, but creating a new alternative does not automatically displace older alternatives. It just provides more choices. It is possible that the washing alternative established by the monkeys on Koshima Island did create a morphogenetic field that made it easier for monkeys on other islands to "discover" the same technique, but the actual research neither supports nor denies that idea. It remains for other cultural experiments and experiences to illuminate this question.
What the research does suggest, however, is that holding positive ideas (as important a step as this is) is not sufficient by itself to change the world. We still need direct communication between individuals, we need to translate our ideas into action, and we need to recognize the freedom of choice of those who choose alternatives different from our own.