Hundredth Monkey Syndrome

A monkey washes food in the sea. Another does the same. Then another and another. After the hundredth monkey does it, suddenly every single monkey knows how, and they all start doing it simultaneously. Critical socio-cultural mass?

UtneReader, over a decade ago, skewered this legend in an issue dedicated to sloppy & marginal thinking. The original research into Japanese macaques learning to fish in the 1950s detailed exactly which individuals washed the potatoes researches bribed them with in the ocean, and when. The folks who decided to make a meme of some kind of magical rollover effect tried to state that "the exact time all the monkeys started doing it is unknown." The time was, in fact, carefully documented & represented nothing more than MonkeySeeMonkeyDo. --PhlIp

Read S. Kawamura. The process of sub-culture propagation among Japanese macaques. Primates, 2:43--60, 1959.

http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/context/1112624/0

This still shows that a good idea at the right time spreads so quickly (exponentially?) that it's hard to pinpoint in retrospect the exact person who originated it, which is why the real innovators can become lost in history. It becomes a MemeticAphorism.

But the folks who coined the term were trying to claim there was metaphysics involved, like primate ESP. Of course there is! But they don't waste it on something mundane like washing potatoes!

So, in the spirit of HMS as a widely regarded as apocryphal aphorism...

Are WorldGeniuses the first monkey, or the hundredth? Which is most likely to go down in history as being the innovator?

WGs are the zeroth monkey.

Is the above simply restating that they don't exist?

How many readers of this wiki are needed to reach the critical socio-cultural mass?

I think we now know that this will never happen...

Ah, but how many Wikis on the Web would it take??? Ah, never mind...

Could HundredthMonkeySyndrome become a catchphrase for popular myths? Can anyone think of others? How about right-brain left-brain? That has now been found to be not as clear-cut as first suspeceted, but people still use it.

Only right-brained people still use the right-brain left-brain metaphor... --PhlIp

As Ivan Stang says, you never hear about the 'Hundredth Hitler' or 'Hundredth Manson' effect. Odd, that.

That's because we yearn for the benign, and do not see the opposite in the shadow.