Carl Sagan and the Samurai Crabs

thousand fathomed sea. Welcome to Stuff to blow your mind from housework dot Com. Hey, you wasn't a stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick and Robert what was that? A reading from? That was a reading from a work that is sometimes referred to as the Japanese Iliad, The Tale of the Haka fourteenth century epic Japanese poem that recounts the struggles between the Haka and the Genji families for control of

medieval Japan. It's a tale of Samurai heroes, war and the tragic fall of the hak family with every everything coming to a bloody climax in the sea Battle of Dana Lura in five Okay, so that's the sea battle that was said to take place in the twelfth century a d r. A long time ago, at the end of the courtier era. And this would be, I guess, sending us into another era of Japanese history, right, the heir of the shogunate, the rule of the military class.

Now we should say there are multiple translations of this of this classic epic. This is from the translation by Burton Watson. That's right, yeah, and you know, different translate. I looked at a few different ones and they all add a little something different to it. For instance, sometimes the words are there's another kingdom beneath the waves, and I kind of like that one a little more. But this seems to be one of the more popular translations

out there. So we're stuck with it. So why did these why did this child leader and the people around him have to plunge into the ocean? Well because they were on the losing side. They were on the what turned out to be the wrong side of of of history at the time. So this again comes at the end of the Hayan period seven through eleven eighty five,

and it was largely a peaceful period. Uh the Genj were weakened in the eleven fifties following two key power struggles in the court, and the Genji leaders involved were executed, but two young boys were spared. You're a Tomo and yoshiot Suni, and they and these guys they've ended up

plotting vene it's twenty years of Genj dominance followed. But you had all these factions that were plotting against the hey K rule, leading to revolt in eleven eighty five years later they would finish the Hayk, bringing an end to the court aristocracy and again beginning this age of the shogun to hate the rule of the warrior class. And this particular heartbreaking read here, which seriously every time i've I've read it in preparation for this podcast, it

gives me chill bumps, um. It takes us to the very end. So the Haka battle fleet has been annihilated, So the Genji have completely defeated them. Right, the few survivors, the warriors and sailors have thrown themselves into the sea to drown instead of being captured and in this reading, the lady knee grandmother of the emperor, which in this in this translation she's just she's described as a nun,

but that is the grandmother. She takes the seven year old emperor a Toku out on a boat and sees that he is not captured by the victor, so they drowned themselves in their defeat, and she consoles him with this line, there is another capital beneath the waves. Yeah, it's it's haunting and tragic and heartbreaking. Well, but but it seeds this idea that at least in the boy emperor's mind, that he wasn't killing himself, but he was

like transitioning to another like stage of rule. Yeah, it's it's it's it's a heartbreaking passage for a number of reasons, because on one hand they're describing the boy is very regal and king like, you know, almost kind of a holy child emperor, which on one hand makes his decision to h or or at least acceptance of his fate like a little more beautiful and noble. But at the same time, you can't help it. Read that, and and and and imagine the alternate view where it's just as

noble as the child's birth. Maybe it's just a child. He's just a child, and he is about to to die beneath the waves instead of being captured by the enemy. And then there is also this idea that the world, that the actual kingdom is just so rife with violence and horror at this point that the kingdom beneath the waves, the kingdom of death, is ultimately the better choice, just complete annihilation over trying to live in this sort of

world anymore. Yeah, that sadness does come through, But also there is this interesting suggestion of a hierarchy even after they have drowned, because what like his servants, that the samurai who have survived come with him, right, and they all they drowned themselves as well. You can imagine them and maybe heavy armor drowning in the waves with their master, and the boy drowns with them. And the suggestion of you mentioned that there are a couple of different translations

of that line. There's another kingdom beneath the waves, or another capital beneath the waves. The idea of a capital suggests there's a whole society in a hierarchy within the society, and that you will be in this capital here like we're going to the We're going to the big boss, and maybe you will be the big boss. Who knows? Yeah, I mean, especially after our recent episodes about myths of my people and beings that live beneath the sea, Like

the magical uh ramifications of this are pretty obvious. The idea that the fallen ruler and his followers will continue to to to live and thrive in another magical place. Now, this is going to be the bridge to our actual topic today. How are we going to get from this beautiful and sad medieval Japanese epic to some crab biology. So members of the hey K family did survive, mostly they were women, and they descended still remember the Battle

of Donna Lura. According to legend, however, the waters near the battle or home to the ghosts of the drowned hey K warriors, and those ghosts take the form of crabs. And indeed there is a variety of crabs to be found in these waters with a curious arrangement of ridges on its back, ridges that seem to form the drastic lines of a grimacing samurai warface is depicted in medieval Japanese art. Yes, and I would say not just the

faces depicted in medieval art. But it also somewhat depicts the Samurai masks you will sometimes see, like uh, where a Samurai armor suit might have a helmet that would have a mask that partially covers the face and the backs of these crabs. The carapace of the crab looks an awful lot like some of these masks. You have these kind of highly stylized oh a faces, these sort of demonic war grimaces that you see on the face

plates of the armor. Yeah. So the idea here would be the samurais transformed into crabs, or their spirits transformed into crabs, and that if you if you see one of these scuttling along, then you are seeing this. Uh. This this this remnant a fall in Samurai Warrior, a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floor of silent seas exactly. Now, of course, before we go too much further, we should let you know this is not the case.

This is the magical, mythic, legendary connotation of the story because certainly, as marine biologist Joe W. Martin points out in his three article The Samurai Crab published in Tara, Uh, the myth of crab people off the coast of Japan likely predates the Battle of Donna, or going back at least as far as the thirteenth century, maybe even before, and is as as is often the case with myths and legends, it was merely adapted to the hey k

after the battle. Okay, so you've got these crabs that you can pull up off the floor of the Silent Sea in this area, and they look like faces. And so he's saying that probably before this battle, people were pulling up these crabs and saying, I see a face, But after the battle people started to say not just I see a face, but look, it's the face of those Samurai warriors who drowned in these waters. Yeah, and

it makes makes perfect sense. Right. You can apply additional narrative to the to the myth, to the legend here and it it brings it to new life. But of course, the reality is you can find these crabs. These crabs are an actual species. They exist. They have nothing to do with ghosts, but they exist, and they really really do look like faces like a lot. Yeah, we'll try to include some photos of these crabs on the landing page for this episode. Stuff toblew your mind dot com.

There is an awesome painting that has included along with Joel Martin's article from nineteen nine. It's a painting by Utagawa Kuniyoshi, and it depicts these these drowned rulers down at the bottom of the ocean, and they've got this this phalanx of crabs coming towards them with those samurai warrior faces on the backs of them. But they're lining up almost as if to serve their new leaders. And

this painting is awesome. We've got to include this if we can on the landing page because it has this this manic, hyperactive, hallucinatory, hieronymous bosh kind of energy blasting out of it. This is such a good painting. Yeah, it's it's dramatic with its human elements within the crabs. Add this additional scuttling horror to the whole piece. I

love it. And it captures the inherent irony of the legend of ghosts of samurai warriors becoming becoming crabs, because such a legend is both haunting and scary and also funny. Crabs are funny, right, I mean, it's not just me right like other people probably look at crabs and think that's a kind of funny animal. The way they move, they're they're they're walking styles, the way they wave their their claws around like it is funny, right, Yeah, yeah,

crabs are inherently funny. I mean, the word crab is inherently funny because of the kr sound in English. But but yeah, the crabs are fun to look at and and chase and to catch if you if you can catch them, crabs are tremendous fun and they're delicious or them are delicious. Yeah, but like you you can't take a crab ghost or a crab monster too seriously, I think, I don't know. Maybe maybe in Japanese culture it's different,

but at least for me, it's impossible. Like I think of one of my favorite old horror movies from the fifties is Attack of the Crab Monsters, the Roger Corman movie, Uh, which just proves you know, if you're talking about killer crabs, it's inherently funny, even if they don't look funny. Well, they have to be gigantic to be perceived as a threat, and so maybe that's part of the horror of the legend here, is that the ghosts of the samurais are

trapped in this lesser form. They're they're all bluster. You know. A crab will will wave its claws at you, but all that can really do is run away or maybe pinch you a little bit. It's not an actual mortal threat. But let's take a look at what this crab species actually is, the one with the supposed samurai face on its carapacet. The scientific name of this crab would be Hakia japonica a formerly known as the Dora pay crab until it was officially granted. It's older and more traditional

name of Hakia in. And so it's got these ridges on its back. That's the thing that captures everybody's it's attention. You look on its back. It's got this carapace shell on the top of it, and it looks a lot like a face. What are these ridges that form the face? Are they purely decorative wells Joe W. Martin points out in that article sent the Samurai crab, they do serve

a purpose. Their external indicators of supportive ridges or epodems inside the creatures carapacet, these are the places where muscles attached. He points out that these features are subject to natural selection, but they occur in nearly all members of the crab family uh doripiday all over the world. At least seventeen crab species in two families in the Indo West Pacific are similar enough to be called Haika ghani by locals. This also includes a variety of Chinese crab is known

as the ghost or demon face crab. Right, and Hayka ghani that that would be the more common name for this crab haka from the story we told, and ghani the Japanese word for crab ghani or khani. Al Right, so we've established the legend, We've established the biological reality of the crab species. But the lingering question is is

there any connection between the two? And remarkably, uh, there's one, or at least a couple of very famous arguments for a connection here in actual connection between the perceived faces on the crabs backs and the legend of the samurai crabs. Yeah. Right, So the question is we've established what the crab is and and what it looks like, but why does it look that way? How did it come to resemble a samurai mask so strongly? Or rather, maybe maybe we should

ask instead why do. We so strongly believe we see a samurai mask when we see the crab. So to sort those quests, Jen's out, We're gonna have to go to our friend Carl Sagan. That's right. We're gonna take a quick break and when we come back we will introduce Sagan. Than alright, we're back, So, Robert, I think it's a shame that we're never going to get to have Carl Sagan on the podcast. It's such a loss that he's gone. Yeah, I mean, Carl Sagan was one

of the most important science communicators of his time. For anyone who's not familiar, he lived or n American astronomer, becausmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, and uh an, author of several books, host of the wonderful TV series Cosmos. Sagan was one of those those great rare people who was actually a great working scientist himself. You know, he was an astronomer, he worked with NASA, He did lots of interesting space research astrophysics, and at

the same time was a great science communicator. And those are very different skills. One other name that comes to mind when I think of that pairing is Darwin, Right, Darwin was both a great scientist and a great science communicator. But you don't always have those same two skills in one person. Yeah, I mean he was. He was intelligent, charismatic, he had the scientific pedigree, but he also had this uh,

this this this outward passion. He was able to to appear on these television shows and you were just instantly enraptured by what he had to say. Yeah, so let's turn to Cosmos. I want to set the scene. It's the fall of nineteen eighty. You are settling in to watch episode two of this magnificent new PBS science show Cosmos. It's hosted by Sagan. Whether or not you know Sagan by now, if you've seen the first episode, you're already enraptured. Uh, you want to hear what he has to say next.

And so episode two of the cot in the original Cosmos series in nineteen eighty starts with Sagan telling the story we started with today. He starts to tell the story of the Battle of dano Ura and its legendary aftermath. And not only does he tell it, but there is a dramatic reenactment of anything. It's it's beautiful to watch. Will include a link to this episode of Cosmos on the landing page of this episode. Right, So we're going to quote from Carl Sagan's explanation of what's going on

with the crab and the legends. So he says, quote, this legend raises a lovely problem. How does it come about that the face of a warrior is cut on the carapace of a Japanese crab? How could it be? The answer seems to be that humans made this face. But how like many other features, the patterns on the back or carapasts of this crab are inherited. But among crabs,

as among humans, there are many different hereditary lines. Now suppose, purely by chance, among the distant ancestors of this crab, there came to be one that looked just a little bit like a human face. Long before the Battle of Danna or he's talking about, fishermen may have been reluctant to eat a crab with a human face and throwing it back into the sea. They were setting into motion

a process of selection. If you're a crab and your carapist is just ordinary, the humans are going to eat you, But if it looked like a face, they'll throw you back and you'll be able to have lots of nice little baby crabs that all look just like you. As many generations passed of crabs and fisher folk alike, the crabs with patterns that looked most like a samurai face preferentially survived, until eventually there was produced not just a human face, not just a Japanese face, but the face

of a Samurai warrior. Now that's that's an incredible idea. Yeah, it's it's the idea of artificial selection. Sagan was saying that by accident, the fisher folk of Japan for many generations had been breeding crabs that looked like samurai in the same way that we breed agricultural crops or agricultural animals for desired traits. You might breed cows or pigs to produce more milk or to have more meat. You might breed dogs to look a certain way or to

be more friendly or tow herd sheep. It would be like if we bread pugs because we didn't want to eat them, like, we just don't eat any of the dogs that look kind of like grotesque human babies. And then you just have pugs running all over the place because they they may be delicious, but they look too much like babies. Right. Well, there's a lot of thought about how we began to breed dogs, right How did

domestic dogs become separated from their wolf like ancestors. And I think a lot of the thinking about that is that the process did not begin intentionally, That we started breeding dogs by accident, selecting for certain traits by accident,

before we started breeding for certain traits on purpose. For example, we might have been breeding for the wolf like ancestor of a dog that had more approach behaviors toward humans because if this if it had more approach behaviors toward humans, it would come closer, would be more likely to get

some scraps from our campsite or something like that. And the dogs that had less approach behaviors towards humans, who were more wary and wanted to stay farther away would not get that extra food, would be less likely to survive. And over time we were accidentally artificially selecting for dogs

that like getting close to bipedal primates. And then when we actually begin involving ourselves and the decisions that when we that's when we start saying, well, let's Let's use these dogs at a little smaller so they can get through the wall and eat the rodents that are disturbing our grain crops. That sort of thing, Yeah, or just I mean, it can be purely aesthetic. You might say, this dog is very cute. I really like the way it looks. I I want to see more dogs like it.

Let's breathe this dog and make it have lots of babies, and then things get out of control and you wind up with the pug anyway, Right, if only you could see the pug equivalent of of what our agricultural crops look like genetically, the crazy breeding process is that have gone into creating the bananas and the corn and all the stuff we eat. It's one of the funny things about people's complaints about genetically modified organisms and food crops is that the food crops we eat today are so

amazingly genetically modified from their ancestral natural variants. Yeah, it's a little late in the game in any respects to start saying, oh, we don't want to we don't want to control or dictate what these organisms, uh manifest as like we've been doing that throughout recorded history and before recorded history. Yeah, but anyway, we need to get back

to the crabs. So Sagan is talking about the fact that this is this is an idea, it's a hypothesis to explain why the carapace of this crab looks so much like a human face, and specifically so much like a samurai face, that it's not just a coincidence, but that it has been artificially selected for by human sorting practices in fishing. Now, Sagan was not the originator of this idea. No. Sagan's idea apparently comes a originally from the British zoologist Sir Julian Huxley, of the of the

famous Huxley family. That's right, he was the grandson of T. H. Huxley, also known as Darwin's Bulldog. Right, And so Huxley wrote an article that was actually believed it or not published

in Life magazine and on June nineteen fifty two. And reading the words of Julian Huxley in Life magazine in nineteen fifty two is really funny because I found a scan of the original magazine and it's got all these like carnation instant milk ads right across from him, and the like pard dog food ads and weird, weird recipes of the fifties that involved what cooking cooking tuna with with with carnation instant milk. It's like the only carnation

instant milk will make this amazing tunic casserole. Anyway, So he's writing in life and he writes the same idea and an article that's more generally about imitation in nature. But he writes, quote the resemblance of Dora Pay and remember that was the original, that was the name Sam they were using for this crab back then. The resemblance of Dora Pay to an angry Japanese warrior is far

too specific and far too detailed to be accidental. It came about because those crabs with a more perfect resemblance to a warrior's face were less frequently eaten than the others. So again, this is an elegant theory, you know, it makes a certain amount of logical sense. We can all envision the scenario taking place, even without a dramatic reinterpretation

from Cosmos. We can we can see the fisher folk pulling up these crabs, looking at him and going, oh, that one's that's a little bit too much like a face. For me to eat it. I'm just gonna throw it back and we'll just see what the next one looks like. Right, I mean, you can imagine that any food animal that looked unnaturally human probably would end up getting selected for

in this way, Right, But is it really true? Does it stand the test of time, time, and the test of additional inquiry into the the origins of the crabs weird samurai face? Right? So for the rest of the episode, we're going to try to address this question. Is the Sagan Huxley hypothesis correct? Was it actually artificial selection by fisher folk being creeped out by faces that made the crabs look like this? Or is it just a coincidence?

And if it's just a coincidence, what explains this striking resemblance. Well, I've already mentioned marine biologist Joe W. Martin's article, and he drops one fact that I think definitely uh is an argument against the idea that that humans were were artificially selecting for these these faces and the crabs, And that's that we have fossils of directed crabs or closely related crab species. They date back to times before the

emergence of humans. Oh okay, So if these crabs were, or if some related crabs were looking like human faces before humans could have been selecting for them, that's definitely going to be a mark against the artificial selection hypothesis, right, unless you take you have to go through, you know, jump through elaborate hoops to say, well, what if an alien species came down saw the faces of existing prominides, or perhaps they had hominid uh facial features themselves, and

then they engineered it into the backs of the crab, etcetera. You have to have some sort of elaborate explanation like that that that that breaks the multiple rules of the natural world. Then again, this doesn't necessarily kill the hypothesis, because you could say that those some related crabs in this family have some features on their backs that do

look kind of like faces. The striking resemblance of the Hakia crabs, specifically to a samurai warrior face could have been honed by artificial selection over time, right, There might have been an initial resemblance that was sharpened by artificial selection exactly. Now. Another huge detail considering, though, according to Martin, is that this one's really hard to shake. Fisher Folk are not in the habit of catching these crabs at all because they only reach a size of about thirty

one millimeters or one point two inches. I want to come back to that point when I get into another criticism in a bit. Yes, yeah, I have some I have some additional notes on that as well. But the idea here is that they're not really worth the trouble with retrieving from the nets, uh, let alone sorting through to see which ones resemble a face or not, because ultimately you don't care because you you have no culinary used for them. I mean, my very brief argument against

this is how about popcorn shrimp? All right, we'll return to this in a minute, the idea of eating the samurai crabs? But well, what does what does Richard Dawkins have to say? What does Papa Dawkins have to share on this topic? Well, Dawkins has an interesting take on it. So Dawkins has a section on Hakia Jeponica in his two thousand nine book The Greatest Show on Earth, which I would recommend. That's a really good That's like after he got done talking about religion for a while and

went back to writing awesome biology books. So when Dawkins brings up the theory. He mentions first that he says it's quote a lovely theory, too good to easily die. But then he goes on to undercut it. So he describes coming across an online poll which allows you to say which of the following you believe? Now, Robert, you think about the options here? First option, the Sagan Huxley

theory is correct. Of respondents agreed with that. The next is, the photos of the crabs resembling Samurai are fakes said that that's obviously not true. There are tons of these high. I mean, the photos don't look particularly faked. Maybe they're thinking they're creations. I don't know. Maybe there maybe there was some particular photo that was faked or enhanced. I've never heard of this, But no, there are tons of these photos and they're they're obviously not fakes. Uh. Next answer,

the shells have been carved to look that way. Six percent of respondents said this. I think that's obviously not true. The next one is it's just a coincidence. Thirty eight percent said this, So it does look like a face, but it's just a coincidence. There was no selection going on for that. And then finally, the crabs really are drowned Samurai warriors said this. I love how that that scored.

There was a higher score for that than for carved crab shells, which, granted, I don't buy the car I don't see the the argument for this being a carving, But that makes far more logical sense than the idea that these are actual ghosts. I don't know, I mean, you know which is more likely. No, wait a minute, I guess you're right. Maybe or maybe maybe people who took the pot were just angry at the end of it and they're like, I can't believe I wasted my time in this. I'll tell you what, I'm going to

vote for the ghosts. Right, So, Dawkins writes, quote, I'm afraid I voted with the kill joys. I think, on balance that the resemblance is probably a coincidence. And Dawkins cites some reasons for saying this. First of all, he

a couple that he cites as weaker minor reasons. First of all, as we said, Martin pointed out in the article we mentioned earlier, the face like ridges and grooves on the crabs carapists actually correspond directly to underlying muscle attachments Now, this wouldn't mean that they can't have been sharpened by artificial selection, but it does show that they're not merely meaningless decorations that serve no purpose of their own and could be you know, selected for in any direction.

They're actually just a byproduct of a necessary part of the crabs muscle anatomy. Right, And and we also have to remember that there is nothing inherently holy or divine about the human face. It is just it is just This's just what our our frontal century array looks like. You know, it's kind of an overstatement of the obvious, but it's easy to miss that. I think that that this is not the face of a primordial god who

then created people in his image. This is just what our particular species of primate happens to have on the front of its skull. Yeah, you need some light sensitive organs, you've got two of them for depth perception, and then you need something that can chew up stuff. It's achieving one set of goals the back of a crab. This crab is achieving another set of goals. And if those solutions should look vaguely familiar or remind or remind you

of the other then Uh, then, yeah, that's that's coincidence. Well, I think one of the things you're pointing out here is that the things that q to us as faces can be incredibly simple and don't have to depart from randomness all that much. Like two dots in a line queues us as face. Right, Yeah, it's we We create faces all the time and we see them in everything. Yeah, and this will be a big point we'll come back

to in just a minute. The next point that Dawkins makes is that the Hackia crabs are too small to keep right. This is another thing that Martin was sort of alluding to. They're too small to keep in. Crab catch would simply throw them back, regardless of what designs they had on their backs, simply because they don't have enough meat. So, first of all, I was thinking, Okay, is this true. We don't know how big they get. But there was a photo that Martin included with his

article from nineteen three. It's of a male specimen caught in Ariaki Bay off Kyushu in Japan in nineteen sixty eight, and you can definitely see the samurai face. It looks like a samurai, But how big is it? The total width of the crabs back is at the widest point twenty point four millimeters or zero point eight inches. Now, that's less wide than you mentioned earlier. It sounds like it could get up to a little over an inch or about thirty millimeters. Uh, that's that's not a very

big crab. I was like trying to imagine, like cracking the shell to get the meat out of a crab that's about an inch wide. Yeah, even a fair sized crab. If you're if you're, if you're, you're cracking open enough of them, it begins to feel like an awful lot of work for the meatia return that you're getting. Yeah, So would they keep a crab like that? I'm not sure? It seems pretty small. Then again, I can't pretend to

know the fishing practices of historical Japan. Well I I can't either, but I do have an illuminating fact on just how inedible a small crab can be. Uh. In this case, we need to consider the plight of the green crab. Take me to the green crab, all right. This is a native of the Northeast Atlantic Ocean in Baltic Sea, but it's an invasive species everywhere else. Including New England. So these guys are roughly ninety millimeters or

three point five inches in size. And while it's tempting to say, well, let's just eat these things, they're the enemy, they're invasive, let's just eat them up in the same way that we've, for instance, promoted the consumption um of lion fish, which are also invasive in many areas. But they're simply too small to get any meat off of

through traditional methods. But since there's a I'm just imagining it like a scene in a comedy movie where somebody brings you tiny crabs and the little cracker things and you're working the nutcracker on something you can barely keep in your fingers. Yeah, you you would like have to use tweezers or something, right, But of course, since there's a reason to wage hungry war on the green crabs, some chefs have started turning them into stock. So that's

that's one potential approach there. And then there's also a Canadian startup called can Chine that has experimented with using a prototype machine to suck the meat out green crafts h now an industrial meat production that's always the best thing to learn the details of that industrial is key, like we're talking about modern advancements that would be necessary like that, this was this is all these details from a two thousand fifteen article Green crabs are multiplying? Should

We Eat Them? By Roger Warner for the Boston Globe. But you know, and it's been a few years, but it still paints a picture of our ability to consume these small crabs still depends on technology that we haven't quite yet developed. He points out in another another solution here would be to catch the crabs molting, essentially have soft shell green crab that you could indeed fry up in the same way that you fry up a soft

sheld crab. This, of course the molten face. You'd have to catch them in the multip You have to catch them at just the right moment and u as of two thousand fifteen, they were only experiencing a fifty six to sixty one percent success rate, and Warner says that we would definitely have to improve that success rate before this would be a like a feasible source of crab meat.

You know, the point you made that's actually sticking with me the most is just the idea of using them for stock I don't know why I didn't even think that, like you, you don't necessarily have to be able to get the meat out of it for it to provide some kind of culinary usage. I mean, people could use a in the same way that people use a whole bunch of seafood products that are not really themselves edible to create stock, like bones and stuff like that. You

make the stock, you strain them out. You could put a bunch of tiny crabs in a pot, make some stock, and then strain them out. I assume, like if they didn't have some kind of bad taste or or mess up the water somehow. Yeah, but still with the green crab, it seems that this is a case where certain chefs who are trying to solve the problem that are they're saying, hey, what can we do with this invasive creature? They have turned to making stock out of them, and it's supposedly delicious.

But I suppose it is not a great reason in and of itself, certainly for Japanese fisher folk of yr to go out there and catch them. Then again, I've got to come back at you. I was wondering how small of a crab people would normally eat in Japan. First, I actually did try to look up fishing practices of medieval Japan, and I couldn't find any details about anything, or at least nothing about how small of a crab

people would keep. But I did find a Japan Times Food and Drink article from two thousand two called in a pinch, these will do just fine by Rick la point. It's about the culinary uses of fresh water crab species called sawa ghani meaning marsh crab or river crab, and the mokuzu ghani or the mitten crab. Now Sawaghani in particular is tiny, barely three centimeters long as an adult, and the point rights quote sawaghani ranging color from deep purple to blue to bright crimson. They are a treat

all summer long, usually available from late May. Not often seen in local supermarkets, sawa ghani are sold in larger retail food markets and at any good fish purveyor. As with makuzu ghani, sawaghani must be cooked thoroughly before being served. These little crab are eaten whole as a rule, and are usually fried briefly, so the crisp shell and all the legs may be eaten so so they fry, they fry them or braise them, eat them whole, eat the whole shell. Oh wow, so they're just they're small enough

to wear their shell is just not that thick. Or it's kind of because normally only hear this with with soft shell crab where the shell the new shell has not yet developed. And so this article ends with a recipe actually for brays sweet, sweet and salty sabaghani with sake, soy, sauce, sugar, and chili powder. It sounds kind of good, it does. I'm I'm suddenly hungry for crab. Now. I don't know if it's possible to eat hay ka ghani in the

same way the samurai crab. Maybe the taste or the texture would be different in a way that would make this impossible. Maybe the shells too hard or something. I looked all over the place for recipes or similar stories featuring Hayka gani, and I couldn't find anything. There were no results I could find for hayka ghani recipes or

ways of preparing them culinary traditions. So I guess it's possible that this could be for cultural reasons, rather than there being some problem with their bodies making them inedible. But I found nothing. All right, let's take another break, and when we come back we will continue to explore the the mystery of the samurai crab. Alright, we're back, Okay, so we finally are going to get to what dawkinsites as his main reason for rejecting the Huxley Sagan theory.

Are you ready, Robert Dawkins writes, quote, My main reason for skepticism about the Huxley Sagan theory is that the human brain is demonstrably eager to see faces in random patterns, as we know from scientific evidence. On top of the numerous legends about the faces of Jesus or the Virgin Mary or Mother Teresa being seen on slices of toast, or pizzas, or patches of damp on a wall. This eagerness is enhanced if the pattern departs from randomness in

the specific direction of being symmetrical. All crabs except hermit crabs are symmetrical anyway, I reluctantly suspect that the resemblance of Hakia to a Samurai warrior is no more than an accident, much as I would like to believe that it has been enhanced by natural selection. This phenomenon that Dawkins is talking about is called paradolia, and it is the tendency that humans have to see information in random noise.

So when you see a face in the side of a tree, or you see the shape of an animal in the clouds or anything like that, things that are actually just random patterns in nature and have no top down control or no information encoded to them still read

as information to us. Yeah. An example of this, too, of the animal realm goes back to our recent Animal Lives episode where we talked about the death the death head moth that said hawk moth, where we just can't get over this skull on its back but there's not really there's not really there aren't really a lot of

great arguments as do why it is there. Yeah, So para idolia would be the theory that says, okay, there is no it's not actually a skull on its back hasn't been selected to look like a skull in in any way. We're just reading information that's not really there because we're primed to look for that kind of stuff and obsessed about it. And so dawkins argument here is essentially that para idolia is so wrong that the departure from randomness need not be especially unlikely before we start

seeing faces in it. I want to phrase the argument another way to try to make it more more specific and measurable. Imagine two different scenarios. Scenario one, if these crabs were being born with a nearly one photo realistic image of Toshiro Mifune's character from yo Jimbo on their backs. Try to imagine that. Right, if you pull a crab out of the ocean and it has a photo real copy of a samurai face on it, that would be

so unlikely to happen naturally or by coincidence. You would have to invoke some kind of special, narrow type of selection, right, Like you'd have to say, okay, somebody three D printed this crab carapist and put it back in the ocean, or there's some kind of crazy genetic engineering of crabs going on. It has to be artificial. And the reason it has to be artificial is that it is such a strong departure from randomness. Right, There's no way a

photo realistic image like that had happen by chance. Right, it must be the work of the gods or the humans that they're both big samurai film buffs. So you know, another scenario, if a crab just had two dots positioned above a curved line, making a crude approximation of like a stick figure smiley face, you would not think that this needed to be selected for, right, it would be. So it's it's so close to random that you wouldn't

need to invoke any special selection to explain it. Now, we're obviously with the Hey Kagani crab, we're somewhere between those two scenarios. It's not a photo realistic image of famous samurai character, but it's also not just two dots with a line or a smiley face. And so the question is which of the scenarios is it closer to. Is it closer to randomness than we're giving it credit for, or is it closer to a real departure from randomness

than we're giving it credit for. Interesting this, right, of course, reminds me of a various conspiracy theories that are out there, you know, like it falls into this area where if you if you squint, or if you just you turn off certain logicum toggles in your brain, then it then it can begin to make a perfect kind of sense. You know, but there's something about the the ambiguity of

it that gives it power. Yeah. Now, of course, in dawkins argument, we'd have to notice that in both of these scenarios I just mentioned, the crude smiley face or the photorealistic image, in both of them we see a face. So we're simply wired to see faces in random designs. And so Dawkins thinks that the crabs carapaces closer to scenario to the almost random smiley face than it is

to Scenario one, the photorealistic face. It's not actually all that strong a departure from randomness, and yet we see the face anyway, because that's what we do, it's what we're wired for. But then again, remember Huxley's claim. Huxley said, specifically, the resemblance of Dora Pay to an angry Japanese warrior is far too specific and too detailed to be accidental. So we've got we've at Dawkins and Huxley at odds here.

Huxley says it's too specific to be a coincidence. Dawkins says it's probably a coincidence, and we're just over interpreting it. How do we know who's right here. Well, certainly we can. We can go back to some of the other facts we've talked about, sort of the time frame, the brief period in which samurai art is a thing or even human faces or a thing versus the larger time scale of crab evolution. But then also we can look to this particular to our particular propensity to see faces and

things like how strong is this effect exactly? So we can come at it from both angles. We can look at what's the chance of the crab would look like that anyway from biological perspective, and we can look at what's the chance that humans would see faces and things that really don't have hardly a face at all on them. And so let's look at the letter. Let's look at this idea of paraidolia. How strong and prevalent is the

paraidolia effect. I want to consult a few studies. There are some that don't quite fee it because they've got odd methodology, But a lot of the paraidolia studies will work like this, like you've got a image on a screen that has a that has pure noise on it, just like random snow static or randomly generated static by some algorithm, and you ask people do you see a letter in the encoded in the static or do you see a face? And sometimes the people who are doing

these experiments will prime you. In fact, in all the examples I could find, they were priming people saying, if you see a face in these pictures, tell us when you see a face, or tell us what kind of face you see. Like one of the studies had faces encoded in the in the static, but the faces didn't have any mouths, and they were asking people do you

see a smiling face or a not smiling face. So one story, for example, was by Corey Reeth at All in Perception in two thousand eleven called Faces in the Mist Illusory Face and Letter Detection. This had hundreds of participants and the study looked at, among other things, what features of random noise images tended to suggest faces and letters. And in this study, after a training period with different types of images, participants were asked to look at whether

images had letters or faces embedded in them. And there were three experiments with pure noise images and participants thought that there were letters embedded in thirty six percent of the images when they were suggested that was a possibility and participants thought there were faces embedded in between thirty two and thirty six percent of pure noise images, depending on whether or not there was an oval in the middle of the image bounding where the face was supposed

to appear. So it looks like there you're showing people pure noise. There's nothing encoded in it, and at least thirty two percent of the time if there's a suggestion that there could be a face, people think they see a face. Another study from fourteen by jianng Liu at All called Seeing Jesus and Toast Neural and Behavioral Correlates of Face paara idolia. The purpose of the study is to quote explore face specific behavioral and neural responses during

illusory face processing. In other words, they were trying to see, Okay, we know people sometimes see faces that aren't there. What's happening in their brains when they see faces that aren't there? And so the participants were twenty healthy Chinese adults and they were showing images composed of pure noise like random

gray scale pattern ngs. The researchers led them to believe that fifty percent of the pure noise images they were seeing contained either images of letters or of faces, and under these conditions, looking at pure randomness but being told it might contain a face, participants said they saw letters in thirty eight percent of the images and faces in

thirty four percent of the images. So that's really close to the figures in the last study, right, It's like thirty something percent of the time if you're told a face might be there and there's nothing there, you will see a face anyway. There's a lot of interesting stuff explored in the research apart from just whether we detect faces and randomness, and I think it might be worth coming back to do a whole episode on the neuroscience

of paraidolia in the future. In the past, I've thought about this in terms of, say, staring into a dark wood, you know, where the one thing you don't want to see is a creepy witch face or troll face staring out at you from the dark. What if you do want to see that, well, then my advice is to keep staring, because I'll often have that effect where I'm staring into the into the woods. I mean not often.

I don't go out every night and staring into the woods, but there are times when I've I've done that where I'm staring into the woods sort of checking it out, and I'll think, what if I see a witch face, and then I'll I'll know intrinsically, if I keep looking, I'm going to see something that I could interpret as a witch face, and it's going to spiral out of control. I need to stop staring into the into the darkness

of the woods. Yeah, yeah, Yeah. There's an interesting theory that a lot of these Paraidolia studies are based on, and it's the idea of studying a black box through random noise, using noise to study what's inside a black box. So if there's some like a brain or a computer that we don't understand the programming of and you want to understand how it works, you can't like get inside it and cut it up and understand how it works.

But what you could do is that you can stimulate it with nothing and see what it generates on its own, to sort of like understand what the base level algorithm generating, what the base level algorithms are, what they generate when there's no real input. So one example of using of studying the human mind like this would be the sensory deprivation tank you put a human in a sensory deprivation tank to see where the mind goes when there's no

input to base output on. Because we have evolved to thrive in a world of of of stimuli, of changing stimuli, and if you take that out of the equation, then all of our sensory feelers are just pawing around it nothing, but they're going to they can still interpret a form in the nothing. Yeah, but that's an interesting way of learning about the nature of the mind. Right when you take away all stimuli, you start to learn, well, what's going on at the base level in my mind? What?

What it? What will it churn up when there's nothing coming in? And so a similar thing would be showing somebody randomness. Now, these studies aren't exactly pure randomness. They're not totally black boxes because they're always priming the participants.

They're always saying, like, you might see a face, tell me if you see a face in this image, And under those conditions, it looks like when you show people random noise that has no information in it and tell them there might be a face, thirty something percent of the time people tend to see a face that sounds like paradolia is naturally pretty strong under people even who are not like prone to hallucinations or anything. So I think that's probably a point in in the favor of

dawkins explanation. Yeah, I mean, if you think about it in terms of human evolution and what and what is valuable environmental information, Uh, you know, a few things are more important than the presence of another organism, because it could be a prey organism, it could be a predator organ as that it could be a member of your own species, which brings with it a number of different possibilities that tie into your survival, right, especially if it's a member of your own species and you are a

social animal like we are. Like, I'm very convinced by the idea that social behavior and managing social relationships is one of the primary factors that shaped the evolution of the anatomically modern human brain. Right, And I mentioned earlier referred to the human face as a sensory array, and part of that goes beyond just because just beyond the fact that it is where our sense organs are our group together, we also use facial expressions and micro expressions

to communicate with one another. It's and and we depend on it far more than than other primates that have, say, more uniform facial features. Our faces are have evolved to to help convey meaning to other members of our species, yes, totally. But also our brains have evolved to be on hyper

for faces. So it's not I mean, para idolia appears to be strong for all kinds of things, but faces are one of these things that were especially looking for their dedicated pathways and structures within the brain that are on alert to see a face and to start interpreting what's up with the face when you see it? Yes,

and then what kind of intent is behind it? So it's it's not that irrational really to imagine plucking a crab out of the sea, looking at it and saying, Oh, this crab has a face on its back, and I think it's angry at me. Yea. Now, one last point I want to talk about against the artificial selection hypothesis that I thought it was very interesting and very straightforward

and simple. I came across this one in a short two thousand ten blog post by an invertebrate biologist named Michael Bach, and we've been talking about the Haika Gani crab specifically, but the Haika Ghani crab is a member of a whole family of crabs called Diripida. We might we might have mentioned Diripida earlier, but we need to

remember they're all kinds of related crabs. And what Boch pointed out is variety of crabs from the diripid A family all have human looking faces on their backs, and lots of these crabs don't even exist in human fisheries, so there's no tradition of humans catching them and potentially keeping or releasing them based on the designs on their backs, right, there's no way they could have been shaped by artificial selection,

and yet they look like faces anyway. So to test this out for myself, I wanted to look up other crabs in the diripid A family. It is. It does appear to be a pretty obscure crab family. It's not stuff that has you know, like really storied species lots of articles about them. But I did discover, to my delight, there is an Internet crab database. Thank the Gods for such a thing. Internet crab database, and some of the

entries have images with them. So I wanted before we wrap up, to look at a little more para Idoli a bait from Family diripid A. So first I've included a picture for us to look at of do rip A Quadridon's what does this look like? This one looks kind of Darth Maul or like a giraffe. Yeah, it looks like Darth Maul. It also kind of looks like a spider face. Do you see that? Yeah? Well, I mean it's hard not to look at a crab and

get a certain certain arachnid feel for them. Right, well, we're looking at a crab top down, but it looks sort of like she lab faced on. Yeah, it does. How about dripoides fashiono. What does this look like? All right, well, this one definitely has kind of a samurai mask will look to it. But also it reminded me a lot of the character Ponda Baba from Star Wars, walrus looking character in the Cantina. Oh yeah, the bug eyes. Yeah, he doesn't like you, that guy, that one. That's what

I see. I see like a stylised samurai version of that character. In this crab, I see straight up predator mask. Yeah. Yeah, you know, a lot of this reminds me of that that that common scenario where you're looking up at the clouds with a friend, and one person sees this animal or this face or this object, and then you see another one. And when you when you present the data to someone, they're like, oh, yeah, I can see that.

I can see a unicorn. I was seeing uh, I was seeing a whale, but now I can see the unicorn. And now I can't unsee the unicorn. So I've primed you for predators. Now yeah, okay, Now we got to look at a couple of pictures of Medora pe lenata. What do you see here, Robert? This one reminds me of some of the creatures in the movie The Diiver. Did you ever see that? No, I've never seen that.

Which so we've got two pictures. One it's sort of standing up and it's it looks like a face to me, but it's got its swimming legs hanging off the back and they're sort of hairy looking, so it actually looks like a person with like a foo man chew mustache. Oh see, well, when I looked at this picture, I saw it looked like it's flipping. It's giving the bird like double birds. Oh, it's got the fingers coming up

in the air. So yeah, it's somebody with a big, long food man chew mustache, but it's also flipping the birds up in the air. See. I mainly saw a stone called Steve Auston when I looked at it because of the fingers. But then the next one that you shared, this one, the one that reminds me of the guy every one, it's more of a picture of its face.

Bringing it all back home to me. That looks like the villain the Giant Crab in Attack of the Crab Monsters because it has these kind of sad, droopy human eyes. It does look like that. Yeah, it reminds me a lot of of this movie that has come up before. Um, I think on the podcast, but definitely on the Trailer

Talk video series that we did for a while. Well. Anyway, as as Box points out in his blog post, all these crabs to some extent look like human faces, not all of them could have been shaped by fisher folk. So while I would not rule out the possibility that certain species of crabs with you know, symmetry on their backs and things that look kind of like faces could have been honed by artificial selection, it's it's possible that fishing practices and throwing things back could have maybe sharpened

the features. I wouldn't use that to explain the emergence of the features themselves, right, Yeah, that's that's pretty much my read on it too. Like the situa wation that that's Sagan especially is laying out here is not at all unbelievable or or or unscientific. It's just not necessary. Yeah, in the in the the evidence against it seems a little too strong. Yeah, And it's not necessary. And if it's not necessary in science, that means it doesn't pass

the test of parsimony. Right. It's it's you don't need to invoke explanations that are not required. Right. It's like again involving an alien species visiting the earth and and doodling faces on the backs of the craft. Right, It's more plausible than that, but it's still just as unnecessary. I now, I also need to point out again though,

that artificial selection is definitely a thing. We already discussed the selective breeding of various organisms for human purposes, everything from horses and cattle to crops to domestic dog breeds. There's also some evidence for the artificial selection of tustless elephants due to human poaching. Yeah, Oh, artificial selection is absolutely something that happens all the time. And so that feeds into another thing I want to say, which is

that I feel really disappointed to lose this theory. It feels sad, it's such it's a wonderful, beautiful explanation of an actual scientific reality. Yeah, and I know we're not alone. Like Dawkins commented that the Huxley slash Sagan story was quote lovely, and he hated that he had to disagree with it. And I see other writers and scientists around the web expressing similar feelings. They're like, it's probably not correct, but I hate to say that. I really want it

to be true. Why do we hate to lose this explanatory story about artificial selection? Like it's not necessary to provide an example of anything. We have a million examples of artificial selection without it, So why can't we bear to let it go? Because I think I think it's that, First of all, it's the accidental aspect of it, the idea that we're just we're doing it. We're not even realizing we're doing it, that we're we're behaving as mad gods. Yeah,

without realizing it. It's artificial selection working without the knowledge of the breeders, Like all of the magic of intention is removed. And this actually does called call into question the very concept of artificial selection. Right, Why do we have a different category for changes that we make to organisms on purpose over time versus changes that happen to organisms,

uh due to pressures from different organisms over time. Like so if a dog or if a if a dog ancestor and you know, some kind of ancestral wolf is shaped by the evolution of a different species. So one of its prey animals or some animal that could hurt it ends up shaping the evolution of this candid over time.

You wouldn't call that artificial, you'd call it natural. But if another organism, that is a relatively smooth bipedal primate shapes the evolution of that dog for some reason, that's the one exception we make, and we call that artificial selection instead of natural. Maybe it's all natural selection. We are animals too, and then the selection ussures that we exert on the natural world are an outgrowth of our

genotype and our phenotype. Well, you know, there's there's one example from the natural world especially that we should consider coming back to and that is, uh, that of leaf cutter ants. You have a creature here with essentially an agricultural product. Yeah, absolutely so is the agricultural product that is farmed by the ant an example of artificial selection? I don't think so, Right, You'd still say that that's natural. So if that's natural, why aren't all the things that

we breed, whether intentionally or unintentionally, natural as well? Well? I think on one level it's there's the there's the fact that humans can do things to an extreme level that other species cannot do. You know, we can. Well, I don't know if i'd agree with you there, because the I mean, other species can shape the animals and the organisms they interact with in really extreme and strange ways. Right, Yeah, But I mean, certainly organism other organisms can cause other

organisms to go extinct. They can, they can and do change their natural habitat. But can you think I mean, but but the sheer scope of human change, I mean, the sheer amount of change that we have brought about in the world during our brief time on this on this Earth, we probably shape the evolution of other organisms, maybe more than does any other organism on Earth outside of microbes. And then there's also the added level that we do so we we we achieve this change via

our conscious understanding of the world. I guess consciousness is what's key here. And in that sense, then if the Sagan Huxley theory were correct, then then it wouldn't be artificial selection, would it, because they weren't doing it on purpose. Yeah. I think that's a strong argument. I guess that probably does it for today. But I'm disappointed we don't get to spend another twenty minutes talking about attack of the

crab monsters. Well, this is why we have to bring at trailer talk at least in an audio form, so that we will have space for our movie references to breathe. I can't wait, all right, So hey, in the meantime, you want to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Heading over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, you'll find all of the episodes there. You also find blog posts some other content links out to our various social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler,

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