This post was published as an essay on Dorothea Mordan’s Medium.com page.
When a critical number of people see a problem, some start seeing an answer.
This essay has to start with a shout out to one of my favorite urban legends/intellectual theories — The Hundredth Monkey Effect. In short, this is a reference to a 1950’s research study of monkeys, which produced a theory that once a critical number of members of a group (in this case 100 monkeys) has learned a new behavior, that behavior will be acquired spontaneously by other groups of monkeys, despite being separated by great distances. In this study, the successive groups of monkeys were on different islands, separated by many miles of ocean.
Continue reading “Problem solving, collective unconscious, and social evolution one piece at a time”