As others have said here, it's very good and pretty powerful.
Just saw Collapse...Absolutely Must See
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=26671
'Collapse': Chris Smith's new film about Michael Ruppert
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=25196
Four big storms on the horizon
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=11001
The Gold Price-Fixing Conspiracy
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=10582
Energy Depletion & the US Descent into Fascism
viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1528
Peak Food ("worst crisis for 30 years")
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David McGowan: Mike Ruppert's Harrowing and Heroic Flight to
viewtopic.php?f=30&t=6825
Michael Ruppert says 'good-bye'
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Mike Ruppert bails....A Permanent Goodbye to the US'
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There really are too many threads to link to about Mike and his Collapse research but what I really wanted to comment upon was my surprise at his use of "The Hundredth Monkey" meme at the end of the film.
I am a fan of Rupert Sheldrake and his ideas about morphogenetic fields and the hypothesis of formative causation and the idea of a tipping point within the collective unconscious of species but the specific story of the hundredth monkey "incident" has, last I checked, been mostly disproven, or at least variations on the story have been clarified as being more a thought experiment... he does call it a fable.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV4xu49jFN8
Mike Ruppert's version of the tale was a new one on me and struck me as synchronistic insomuch as I've been thinking a lot about America's nuclear experimentation on humans (re: Redfern vs Jacobsen's version of Roswell).
Hundredth monkey effect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The hundredth monkey effect is a supposed phenomenon in which a learned behavior spreads instantaneously from one group of monkeys to all related monkeys once a critical number is reached. By generalization it means the instantaneous, paranormal 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. 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.
*
[edit] Popularization of the claim
The story of the hundredth monkey effect was published in the foreword to Lawrence Blair's Rhythms of Vision in 1975.[2] The claim spread with the appearance of Lifetide, a 1979 book by Lyall Watson. In it, Watson repeats Blair's claim. The authors describe similar scenarios. They state that unidentified scientists were conducting a study of macaques monkeys on the Japanese island of Koshima in 1952.[3] These scientists purportedly observed that some of these monkeys learned to wash sweet potatoes, and gradually this new behavior spread through the younger generation of monkeys—in the usual fashion, through observation and repetition. Watson then claimed that the researchers observed that once a critical number of monkeys was reached—the so-called hundredth monkey—this previously learned behavior instantly spread across the water to monkeys on nearby islands.
This story was further popularized by Ken Keyes, Jr. with the publication of his book The Hundredth Monkey. Keyes' book was about the devastating effects of nuclear war on the planet. Keyes presented the hundredth monkey effect story as an inspirational parable, applying it to human society and the effecting of positive change. Since then, the story has become widely accepted as fact and even appears in books written by some educators.
[edit] The original research
In 1985, Elaine Myers re-examined the original published research in “The Hundredth Monkey Revisited” in the journal In Context. In her review she found that the original research reports by the Japan Monkey Center in Vol. 2, 5, and 6 of the journal Primates are insufficient to support Watson’s story. In short, she is suspicious of the existence of a hundredth monkey phenomenon; the published articles describe how the sweet potato washing behavior gradually spread through the monkey troupe and became part of the set of learned behaviors of young monkeys, but she doesn’t agree that it can serve as an evidence for the existence of a critical number at which the idea suddenly spread to other islands.
However, the story as told by Watson and Keyes is popular among New Age authors and personal growth gurus and has become an urban legend and part of New Age mythology. Also, Rupert Sheldrake has cited that a phenomenon like the hundredth monkey effect would be an evidence of Morphic fields bringing about non-local effects in consciousness and learning. As a result, the story has also become a favorite target of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal and was used as the title essay in The Hundredth Monkey: And Other Paradigms of the Paranormal published by them in 1990.
In his book Why People Believe Weird Things, Michael Shermer explains how the urban legend started, was popularised, and has been discredited.
[edit] The effect discredited
An analysis of the appropriate literature by Ron Amundson, published by the Skeptics Society, revealed several key points that demystified the supposed effect.
Unsubstantiated claims that there was a sudden and remarkable increase in the proportion of washers in the first population were exaggerations of a much slower, more mundane effect. Rather than all monkeys mysteriously learning the skill it was noted that it was predominantly younger monkeys that learned the skill from the older monkeys through observational learning, which is widespread in the animal kingdom;[4] older monkeys who did not know how to wash tended not to learn. As the older monkeys died and younger monkeys were born the proportion of washers naturally increased. The time span between observations was in the order of years.
Claims that the practice spread suddenly to other isolated populations of monkeys may be disproven given the fact that at least one washing monkey swam to another population and spent about four years there. It is also to be noted that the sweet potato was not available to the monkeys prior to human intervention.[5][6]
[edit] See also
* Meme
* Tipping point (sociology)
[edit] References
[edit] Footnotes
1. ^ Amundson, Ron (Summer 1985). Kendrick Frazier. ed. "The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon". Skeptical Inquirer: 348-356.
2. ^ Blair, Lawrence (1975). Rhythms of Vision: The Changing Patterns of Belief. London: Croom Helm Ltd.. ISBN 9780805236101.
3. ^ Blair, unlike Watson does not assign the date 1952 to the observations
4. ^ Galef,B.G. (1992) The question of animal culture. Human Nature, 3, 157-178
5. ^ Amundson, Ron (Summer 1985). Kendrick Frazier. ed. "The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon". Skeptical Inquirer: 348-356.
6. ^ Galef,B.G. (1992) The question of animal culture. Human Nature, 3, 157-178
[edit] Sources
* Carroll, Robert Todd (2005). Skeptic’s Dictionary. http://skepdic.com/monkey.html.
* Myers, Elaine (Spring 1985). "The Hundredth Monkey Revisited". In Context. http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC09/Myers.htm.
* Pössel, Markus; Amundson, Ron (May/June 1996). "Senior Researcher Comments on the Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon in Japan". Skeptical Inquirer. http://www.csicop.org/si/9605/monkey.html.
* Amundson, Ron (Summer 1985). Kendrick Frazier. ed. "The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon". Skeptical Inquirer (Prometheus Books): 348–356. ISBN 0-87975-655-1Reprinted in The Hundredth Monkey—And Other Paradigms of the Paranormal (1991) (see online version under External links)
* Amundson, Ron (Spring 1987). Kendrick Frazier. ed. "Watson and the Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon,". Skeptical Inquirer (Prometheus Books): 303–304. ISBN 0-87975-655-1Reprinted in The Hundredth Monkey—And Other Paradigms of the Paranormal (1991)
[edit] External links
* Tipping Point book Q&A at Malcolm Gladwell's website
* “The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon”, Ron Amundson's copy of his Skeptical Inquirer article of 1985
* Dexter Sinister's website blogging of the Whitney Biennial of 2008, (a possible example of the Hundredth Monkey Effect in action)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundredth_monkey_effect
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Anyway, it surprised me that he'd invoke that meme when it has proven to be so divisive and considered to be a "hoax". Then again, as he says in the film, he's not trying to convince everybody - just those who are on the same page and want to start "building life boats" for what's coming.
