Memes for the Creation of a New Culture

Have you heard the story about Hundredth Monkey? If you haven’t, here is how the story goes, as told by Ken Keyes Jr. in his 1982 best-selling book, The Hundredth Monkey:

The Japanese monkey, Macaca fuscata, has been observed in the wild for a period of over 30 years.

Welcome to Memes for the Creation of a New Culture, a book-in-progress by Bruce Eisner. Wherever you are in the book, in the right sidebar you will always see a Site Treethat is book’s table of contents.The brightest entry in the tree, the one with the reddish glow around it shows the section of the book you are. Right now it is pointed to “What This Book is About” and you will notice that this is the title of the section you are reading.

In 1952, on the island of Koshima scientists were providing monkeys with sweet potatoes dropped in the sand. The monkeys liked the taste of the raw sweet potatoes, but they found the dirt unpleasant

This cultural innovation was gradually picked up by various monkeys before the eyes of the scientists.

Between 1952 and 1958, all the young monkeys learned to wash the sandy sweet potatoes to make them more palatable.

Only the adults who imitated their children learned this social improvement. Other adults kept eating the dirty sweet potatoes.

Then something startling took place. In the autumn of 1958, a certain number of Koshima monkeys were washing sweet potatoes — the exact number is not known.

Let us suppose that when the sun rose one morning there were 99 monkeys on Koshima Island who had learned to wash their sweet potatoes.

Let’s further suppose that later that morning, the hundredth monkey learned to wash potatoes.

THEN IT HAPPENED!

By that evening almost everyone in the tribe was washing sweet potatoes before eating them.

The added energy of this hundredth monkey somehow created an ideological breakthrough!

But notice.

A most surprising thing observed by these scientists was that the habit of washing sweet potatoes then jumped over the sea —

Colonies of monkeys on other islands and the mainland troop of monkeys at Takasakiyama began washing their sweet potatoes!

Macaques Monkeys

Keyes tells us that he first read the story, which is described in more detail in the 1979 book, Lifetide by Lyle Watson. Keyes goes on to give his interpretation of the implications that these observations have for us.

Thus, when a certain critical number achieves an awareness, this new awareness may be communicated from mind to mind.

Although the exact number may very, the Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon means that when only a limited number of people know of a new way, it may remain the consciousness property of these people.

But there is a point at which if only one more person tunes-in to a new awareness, a field is strengthened so that this awareness is picked up by almost everyone!

Your awareness is needed in saving the world from nuclear war.

You may be the “Hundredth Monkey” .

At the time Keyes book came out, I was living in Santa Cruz, California, a beach town about 95 miles south of San Francisco, where I lived because it was a refuge for members of the Sixties hippie movement, a place to find community. The book was prominently displayed on the checkout counters of the local health food store where I bought groceries.

I loved this story when I read it, because it fit in with many of my beliefs, including the possibility that there might be undiscovered human potentials including psychic powers. I was also an anti-war activist and so it helped my enthusiasm as a call to join the movement.

I told and retold the story to friends and even in lectures I gave, for a variety of purposes.

The Hundredth Monkey story is a great tale with one problem, one problem which I consider quite serious. This great story with such amazing implications is not true, it is an urban legend that did not actually happen the way that it was told by Ken Keyes.

The website, the Skeptic’s Dictionary devotes a long page to giving some of the background of this urban myth. Because the story really began with the late Dr. Lyle Watson, it starts with version of what had happened, as it first appeared in the 1979 book, Lifetide: the biology of unconscious;

I am forced to improvise the details, but as near as I can tell, this is what seems to have happened. In the autumn of that year an unspecified number of monkeys on Koshima were washing sweet potatoes in the sea. . . . Let us say, for argument’s sake, that the number was ninety-nine and that at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday morning, one further convert was added to the fold in the usual way. But the addition of the hundredth monkey apparently carried the number across some sort of threshold, pushing it through a kind of critical mass, because by that evening almost everyone was doing it. Not only that, but the habit seems to have jumped natural barriers and to have appeared spontaneously, like glycerine crystals in sealed laboratory jars, in colonies on other islands and on the mainland in a troop at Takasakiyama.

The Skeptic’s Dictionary entry goes on to refute the story.

It makes for a cute story, but it isn’t true. At least, the part about spontaneous transmission of a cultural trait across space without contact is not true. There really were some macaque monkeys who washed their sweet potatoes. One monkey started it and soon others joined in. But even after six years not all the monkeys saw the benefit of washing the grit off of their potatoes by dipping them into the sea. . Watson made up the part about the mysterious transmission.

Michael Shermer, founder and Editor-in-Chief of Skeptic magazine wrote about the Hundredth Monkey tale in his 2002 book, Why people believe weird things: pseudoscience, superstition, and other confusions of our time provides an alternative set of events to the two versions of the story of the monkeys on those Japanese islands, based on his research into the published data:

Scientists do not “improvise” details or make wild guesses from “anecdotes” and “bits of folklore.” In fact, some scientists did record exactly what happened (for example, Baldwin et al. 1980; Tmanishi 1983; Kawai 1962). The research began with a troop of twenty monkeys in 1952, and every monkey on the island was carefully observed. By 1962, the troop had increased to fifty-nine monkeys and exactly thirty-six of the fifty-nine monkeys were washing their sweet potatoes. The “sudden” acquisition of the behavior actually took ten years, and the “hundred monkeys” were actually only thirty-six in 1962. Furthermore, we can speculate endlessly about what the monkeys knew, but the fact remains that not all of the monkeys in the troop were exhibiting the washing behavior. The thirty-six monkeys were not a critical mass even at home. And while there are some reports of similar behavior on other islands, the observations were made between 1953 and 1967. It was not sudden, nor was it necessarily connected to Koshima. The monkeys on other islands could have discovered this simple skill themselves, for example, or inhabitants on other islands might have taught them. In any case, not only is there no evidence to support this extraordinary claim, there is not even a real phenomenon to explain.

The Hundredth Monkey story in its original appearance in biologist Lyle Watson’s Lifetide was not cited as a call to activism as Keyes did.  In the above excerpt from Lyle’s account of the 100th monkey phenomenon, he compares the transmission of  the potato washing behavior to “glycine crystals in sealed laboratory jars.” This analogy is drawn from an earlier story that Watson tells about the the history of glycine, a colorless liquid first extracted from natural fats some four centuries ago.

To make a long story shorter, it was told that glycine always was known only to be a liquid and was always assumed not to have a solid form until a large quanity of the substance, being transported a barrel were found to contain glycine crystals. A sample sent to two researchers were used to seed glycine in a sealed laboratory container. The scientists then found that all of their other samples of glycine in the lab, also sealed air-tight now were filled with glycine crystals, replacing the liquid that had been there previously. According to the story, from that time forward, glycine would take the form of a crystal, rather than a liquid.

Lyle used these stories in Lifetide as evidence supporting the existence of psychic phenomenon.