A further titbit supporting this hypothesis is the Story of the 100th
Monkey...

The 100th monkey story originally appeared in Lyall Watson's
book "LIFETIDE"
http://www.Amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0340416688/sunflowerheal-21
and is summarised below...

Watson's reports that in 1952, a zoologist studying the behaviour of
Japanese macaque monkeys, supplied monkeys in one colony on the
island of Koshima with sweet potatoes, a foodstuff of which they had
no experience. The sweet potatoes were thrown onto the beach and in
the process became coated in sand. One of the monkeys, an 18-month
old female, called Imo, solved the problem of the sand on the
potatoes by carrying them down to a stream and washing them before
eating. Other exploratory young monkeys in the colony copied her and
this novel potato-washing behaviour spread through the colony. By
1958 all the juveniles were washing dirty food and some of the adults
learned to do so by imitating their children.

Nothing very surprising so far, but then Watson says: "Then something
extraordinary took place. The details up to this point in the study
are clear, but one has to gather the rest of the story from personal
anecdotes and bits of folklore among primate researchers, because
most of them are still not quite sure what happened. ..... I am
forced to improvise the details, but as near as I can tell, this is
what seems to have happened." He goes on to tell the "100th monkey"
story, making it clear that this is not literally what happened, but
a kind of dramatisation of it:

"In the autumn of that year [1958] an unspecified number of monkeys
on Koshima were washing sweet potatoes in the sea, because Imo had
made the further discovery that salt water not only cleaned the food
but gave it an interesting new flavour. Let us say, for arguments
sake that the number was 99 and that at eleven o'clock on the Tuesday
morning, one further convert was added to the fold in the usual way.
But the addition of the 100th monkey apparently carried the number
across some sort of threshold, pushing it through a kind of critical
mass, because by that evening almost everyone in the colony was doing
it. Not only that, but the habit seems to have jumped natural
barriers to have appeared spontaneously, like glycerine crystals in
sealed laboratory jars, in colonies in other islands and on the
mainland in a troop at Takasakiama."

A Metaphysical Ether?
---------------------
Cambridge-trained scientist, Dr. Rupert Sheldrake [more about him in the post
"Exploring The Mind - Beyond the Brain"
http://www.cheal.org/message/559] comments...

"This story has been repeated by all sorts of new age speakers and
writers, mutating as it is retold. I think that the observations to
which Watson was referring does show something like "morphic
resonance", but exaggerated versions of the story often bear little
relation to what really happened. I myself prefer the example of rats
that learned a new trick in one laboratory (Harvard) and later groups
of rats in other laboratories, in Scotland and Australia that learned
the new trick quicker. The details are given in my book A New Science
of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance"
http://www.Amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0892815353/sunflowerheal-21

Enemies of Reason?
------------------
I watched Professor Richard Dawkins' TV documentary "Enemies of
Reason" this evening.

"Hello and welcome to Shooting Fish in a Barrel with your host,
Professor Richard Dawkins. He's looking for trouble again, dead set
on challenging the superstitious thinking that for him impoverishes
our culture. His point is simple: when science has brought us so
much, "from sewage systems to satnav", why embrace tosh like
astrology? So he goes after the culprits and politely skewers them.
The look on a dowser's face when she discovers in an experiment that
she can't, in fact, find water with wavy sticks, is priceless. And
the tarot reader fl ailing to "read" something, anything, relevant to
Dawkins is almost sad. (Derren Brown explains how such "psychics"
work.) Dawkins is like a knight on his charger of reason cantering
through thickets of delusion and bogs of nonsense. But there's a
nagging sense that, with the number of physics A-levels halved in the
last 25 years, he may be a voice crying in the wilderness."

He attacks all kinds of "New Age" [which often means "Ancient -
brought up to date!" of course] beliefs and practices and showed some
horrifying examples of "New Age" practitioners and speakers with more
than a little connection to the rear end of male cattle, while
studiously ignoring all the fertiliser that has emanated from the
evidence-based scientific community over the years. He [quite
correctly] applauded all the great advances that science and
technology have brought us, while studiously ignoring their downside
aspects such as pollution, over-population and global warming.

I am glad that the programme has been shown, because it is a
cautionary reminder, to all of us involved in intuitive, psychic,
paranormal and alternative health practices, that wishful thinking,
ego-agendas and creative imagination can all sweep us away if we
neglect to run our beliefs and practices through the filter of our
critical/sceptical/discriminatory faculties and the acid-test of
grounded results.

Personally I seek to integrate my reasoning mind with my feeling
senses, rather than to elevate one above the other, as Professor
Dawkins does. Having spent most of my life in the world of evidence-
based medicine I know that it encourages a (self-)disciplined and
(self-)critical approach to practice that can serve us and our
clients well. I also know that in the real-world [i.e. outside the
ivory-tower of academia], effective practice of healthcare and
personal development goes well-beyond the very limited (and highly
retrospective) experience of evidence-based research.

It is a myth that evidence-based research is based on objective data.
Evidence-based data is planned, gathered and interpreted by those
partly irrational (emotional, egocentric, biased and suggestible)
creatures with more than a nodding [observing] relationship to the
Japanese macaque!

Mike
http://www.sunflower-health.com