The hundredth monkey effect is a supposed phenomenon in which a behavior or thought spreads rapidly from one group to all related groups once a critical number of initiates is reached. By generalization it means the instantaneous spreading of an idea or ability to the remainder of a population once a certain portion of that population has heard of the new idea or learned the new ability by some unknown process currently beyond the scope of science. The story behind this supposed phenomenon originated with Lawrence Blair and Lyall Watson in the mid-to-late 1970s, who claimed that it was the observation of Japanese scientists. One of the primary factors in the promulgation of the story is that many authors quote secondary, tertiary or post-tertiary sources who have themselves misrepresented the original observations.
Read more about Hundredth Monkey Effect: Popularization of The Claim, The Original Research, The Effect Discredited
Famous quotes containing the words hundredth, monkey and/or effect:
“Little of all we value here
Wakes on the morn of its hundredth year
Without both feeling and looking queer.
In fact, there’s nothing that keeps its youth,
So far as I know, but a tree and truth.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)
“You’re just wasting your breath and that’s no great loss either!”
—S.J. Perelman, U.S. screenwriter, Arthur Sheekman, Will Johnstone, and Norman Z. McLeod. Groucho Marx, Monkey Business, a wisecrack made to his fellow stowaway Chico Marx (1931)
“Man is endogenous, and education is his unfolding. The aid we have from others is mechanical, compared with the discoveries of nature in us. What is thus learned is delightful in the doing, and the effect remains.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)