The Hundredth Monkey

When enough monkeys learned to wash the potato, the story goes, monkeys everywhere knew.

The hundredth monkey story (Koshima macaques' potato-washing spreading non-locally once a threshold was reached) is documented as an error: Watson's 1979 account acknowledged invention ('I am forced to improvise'), and Amundson's 1985 analysis of the primatology record found ordinary observational learning, no threshold, no cross-island jump. Keyes' 1981 anti-nuclear book spread it. The node is the archive's canonical broken-telephone specimen: a real study, a confessed embellishment, and a doctrine that outlived the correction, linked to morphic resonance.