The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon

Due to a combination of friendly nagging and a desire to be one of the cool kids doing this whole blogging thing, I have finally succumbed, installed WordPress, and am writing my very first post. However, rather than posting a poetic statement of purpose, since such a attempt to confine the random workings of my mind would be rather silly, I’m going to discuss my blog’s title, The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon.

I came across it today while looking for a blog title. After a long, futile attempt to come up with a meaningful blog title, I decided to just go for something fun, and the first “fun” thing I typed into Google was “99 Monkeys,” which was already taken. So what’s better than 99 monkeys? 100 of those freaking critters, and it turns out to be a cool concept.

The hundredth monkey phenomenon refers to a sudden spontaneous and mysterious leap of consciousness achieved when an allegedly “critical mass” point is reached. The idea of the hundredth monkey phenomenon comes from Dr. Lyall Watson in his book Lifetide (1979)…[snip]…So, wrote Watson:

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.

Yes, according to Watson, one monkey taught another to wash sweet potatoes who taught another who taught another and soon all the monkeys on the island were washing potatoes where no monkey had ever washed potatoes before. When the “hundredth” monkey learned to wash potatoes, suddenly and spontaneously and mysteriously monkeys on other islands, with no physical contact with the potato-washing cult, started washing potatoes! Was this monkey telepathy at work or just monkey business on Watson’s part?

- from http://skepdic.com/monkey.html

So there you have it: The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon. It’s another phrase for a “tipping point.” Who knows; maybe I’ll be the hundredth monkey posting entries about the Semantic Web and somehow push the concept over the brink!