The 100th Monkey Theory has been on the WOW site since 1996, and we occasionally receive letters claiming that it was a hoax or fake.
We contacted Penny Gillespie, who was married to Ken Keyes and participated in his work and writing. Here is her response:
I'm not sure what you mean by "fake." The Hundredth Monkey is a real book and hundreds of thousands of copies were printed and circulated, often through university courses. People bought them by the case and gave them away.
The story of the hundredth monkey came from a writing by Rupert Sheldrake.
After our book was printed, there was some question about whether the study was authentic. Ken presented the story as a legend, or phenomenon; the concepts of morphogenetic fields and critical mass are very true and the story serves to illustrate them.
Hope that answers your question.
All the best,
Penny Gillespie
Some more interesting notes on this topic:
http://www.wowzone.com/monkey.htm
The story may have been embellished to prove a point but to dismiss the idea as fraudulent is not very productive. It is the job of skeptics to poo poo everything whether useful or not.
