THE HUNDREDTH MONKEY

1952 - A VERY GOOD YEAR

THE 100TH MONKEY EFFECT BEGAN IN 1952

Something started in 1952, which was accomplished by 1958,
which had never been noticed before. The 100th Monkey Effect.
 

HUGE GLOBAL UFO SIGHTINGS IN 1952

1952 was about the busiest year ever for the sightings of UFOs
in the atmosphere of our Earth. Was, perhaps, friendly ET giving
humanity - via an obliging species of life on Earth - a helpful hand
in understanding how consciousness and change function?
 
 

THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

THE 100TH MONKEY EFFECT

The following is from 'Lifetide', by Lyall Watson.
Book Club Associates, London, 1979. Pages 155-158.
 

"..... This might imply that the essential conflict is between
the newer parts of the forebrain and the more primitive parts
in the mid and hind brains. Between the mammalian and
reptilian memories. And in a sense this is probably correct,
but I doubt that it is possible or even necessary to isolate
the command centres of the opposing forces in any spatial
location. The war is between the old selfish instructions and
the new self-awareness. Between genotype and aspects of
the phenotype. Between the needs of the replicators to keep
on doing their thing, which is replicating, and the desire of
the organism for identity. The battle lines are drawn
between orders and ideas.

Where the two coincide, a truce is declared and progress
takes place by leaps and bounds. But where they disagree,
skirmishes are fought in the no man's land of the mind and
ambivalent we, with all our special strengths and peculiar
frailties, are the result. I believe the seeds of this conflict are
sewn in every cell by the presence there of nuclear DNA and
factors connected with the contingent system. And that just
as the presence and pattern of a number of cells behaving
in a certain way can produce sensations such as sight or
sound, so the mere existence of contingent factors in
sufficient numbers in certain critical configurations could
account for their recent intrusion in evolutionary affairs.

There is a biological analogy which makes
this process clear.
 

IMO - THE FIRST MONKEY

The behaviour of the Japanese monkey Macaco fuscata has
been studied intensely for more than thirty years in a number
of wild colonies. One of these is isolated on the island of
Koshimajust off the east coast of Kyushu, and it was here in
1952 that man provided the monkeys with the right sort of
evolutionary nudge. Provision stations were established at
selected sites in the range of the troop. Normally young
monkeys learn feeding habits from their mothers who teach
them by example what to eat and how to deal with it, and in
these macaques the behaviour had grown to a complex
tradition involving the buds, fruits, leaves, shoots and bark
of well over a hundred species of plants. So they approached
the new artificial food supplies equipped with a formidable
array of behavioural predispositions, but nothing in their
established repertoire enabled them to deal effectively
with raw sweet potatoes covered with sand and grit.

Then an eighteen month old female, a sort of monkey
genius called Imo, solved the problem by carrying the
potatoes down to a stream and washing them before
feeding. In monkey terms this is a cultural revolution
comparable almost to the invention of the wheel.
It involves abstraction, the identification of concept,
and deliberate manipulation of several parameters in
the environment. And, reversing the normal trend, it
was the juvenile Imo who taught the trick to her mother.
She also taught it to her playmates and they in their turn
spread the news to their mothers. Slowly, step by step,
the new culture spread through the colony, with each new
conversion taking place in full view of the observers who
kept a constant watch right through all the daylight hours.

By 1958, all the juveniles were washing dirty food, but
the only adults over five years old to do so were the ones
who learned by direct imitation from their children.

Then something extraordinary took place.

The details up to this point in the study are clear, but one
has to gather the rest of the story from personal anecdotes
and bits of folklore amongst primate researchers, because
most of them are still not quite sure what happened.
And those who do suspect the truth are reluctant
to publish it for fear of ridicule.

So I am forced to improvise the details, but as near
as I can tell, this is what seems to have happened.
 

THE HUNDREDTH MONKEY

In the autumn of that year an unspecified number of monkeys
on Koshima were washing sweet potatoes in the sea, because
Imo had made the further discovery that salt water not only
cleaned the food but gave it an interesting new flavour.

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 in the colony 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 latest news from Japan is that Imo has by no means
exhausted her powers, but has unleashed several additional
cultural bombshells. Another of the foods provided at the
stations is wheat, which the monkeys enjoy but find difficult
to deal with once it has blown out of containers onto the sand.
Imo was only three when she solved this dilemma by picking
up mixed handfuls of sand and wheat and winnowing the
grain by casting both into the sea. There the sand soon sank,
leaving the wheat floating free on the surface where it could
easily be scooped up and eaten. At the moment this
subculture has spread only to Imo's immediate associates,
but it will be fascinating to see what happens next.
I personally wouldn't be surprised if, in her later years,
Imo re-invented agriculture.

The relevance of this anecdote is that it suggests
there may be mechanisms in evolution other than
those governed by ordinary natural selection.

I feel that there is such a thing as the Hundredth
Monkey Phenomenon and that it might account for
the way in which many memes, ideas and fashions
spread through our culture.

It may be that when enough of us hold something
to be true, it becomes true for everyone.

Lawrence Blair says:  'When a myth is shared by
large numbers of people, it becomes a reality.'

I'll happily add my one to the number sharing
that notion, because it may be the only way we
can ever hope to reach some sort of meaningful
human consensus about the future, in the short
time that now seems to be at our disposal.

Lyall Watson,  'LIFETIDE'.
 

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OPERATION 'TELL ANOTHER' IN 2004

HUGE GLOBAL UFO SIGHTINGS IN 1952

1952/53 approx ......... 2002/03 approx