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© Copyright 2002, Jim Loy
In the late 1950's, some Japanese scientists observed an interesting phenomenon in a population of macaques (a kind of monkey) on the island of Koshima. The monkeys were given sweet potatoes and wheat mixed in with sand, and they had to laboriously pick the food out of the sand. One young monkey learned to wash the food out of the sand with water. Other monkeys learned to do this by watching the original monkey. The behavior spread.
Eventually this behavior spread to other islands. And Lyall Watson guessed that the monkeys on other islands had learned it by some form of telepathy. He guessed that once a piece of knowledge is known by a certain number of beings, perhaps 100, then the idea naturally spreads by telepathy to other beings. There is virtually no evidence in support of this idea. And there is ample evidence that monkeys swim from island to island, being natural swimmers. There is also nothing to prevent two or three monkeys from learning the simple trick all by themselves. Mr. Watson assumed that the original monkey in the story was a great monkey genius, on the order of Newton or Einstein. But monkeys are very clever animals, often making fools of their human keepers in zoos.
The hundredth monkey theory is a classic case of wishful thinking. Ken Keyes popularized the hundredth monkey idea in a book. His motives were that he wished that ideas like nuclear disarmament and peace would spread like wildfire through human civilization by telepathy. Good idea.