Let us say, for argument's sake, that the number was 99 and that at 11 o'clock on a Tuesday morning, one further convert was added to the fold in the usual way. "In the autumn of 1958 ," Watson went on, "an unspecified number of monkeys on Koshima were washing sweet potatoes in the sea. And those who do suspect the truth are reluctant to publish it for fear of ridicule. story from personal anecdotes and bits of folklore among primate researchers," Watson wrote, "because most of them are still not quite sure what happened. In 1958, according to the challenged book by Watson, an astonishing thing happened. As the young macaques grew up, they taught it to their offspring. Over the ensuing years, as scientists watched closely, other monkeys copied the practice. And perhaps the potato tasted better salted, as well, so she kept up the behavior.
The following year the scientists observed that one young monkey, named Imo, discovered she could wash sand off the potato by dipping it in the water.
In 1952 the scientists began giving the monkeys on Koshima Island sweet potatoes as food, tossing the tubers onto the beach. The hundredth monkey phenomenon traces its origin to research in the 1950s by Japanese scientists who were studying free-roaming troops of macaques that live on a few small islands. The committee was formed about 10 years ago by a group of scientists and others hoping to counteract what they saw as a rising tide of belief in supernatural phenomena. His report appears in the current issue of The Skeptical Inquirer, the quarterly journal of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. The debunker is Ron Amundson, a philosophy professor who specializes in the philosophy of science and the rise of pseudosciences. The truth, according to a University of Hawaii professor who examined the evidence, is that "there is no hundredth monkey phenomenon," that the notion of a spontaneous spread of a behavior among Japanese monkeys is a fiction that is completely refuted by the published data of the same Japanese primatologists who, it is claimed, discovered the phenomenon.
Elements of the nuclear disarmament movement have promoted the idea with the assertion that if enough human minds can be won to their cause, the whole world will suddenly be seized by an urge to disarm. The putative phenomenon was first popularized in a 1979 book, "Lifetide" by Lyall Watson, and since then has gained increasing currency in other books, magazines and films. The idea is that once a certain number of minds, 100 monkey minds in the most famous example, share a common idea, they activate something called a collective consciousness that immediately transmits the same idea to other minds. What happened, so the story goes, was that whole troops of monkeys living on widely separated Japanese islands spontaneously acquired a new behavior - washing sand off food by dunking it in water - after a critical number of animals on one island learned the practice by the conventional method of imitation. It's called "the hundredth monkey phenomenon" and in recent years word of it has spread widely, leading many people to believe that scientists have discovered a genuine, new kind of paranormal event.
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