Carl Sagan and the Samurai Crabs

Legend has it that a variety of crabs contain the ghosts of a drowned samurai army -- and each bears a grimacing warrior face on their backs to prove it. But what can we really gather from this biological peculiarity? In the book and TV series “Cosmos,” Carl Sagan argued that it presented a case of artificial selection, but critics disagree. Join Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick for a discussion of the Heikegani.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Dressed in a dove gray robe, his hair now done
in boyish loops, one either side of his head. The child,
his face bathed in tears, pressed his small hands together,
knelt down and bowed first towards the east, taking his
leave of the deity of the shrine. Then he turned

(00:25):
towards the west began chanting the Nimbootsu, the invocation of
Amida's name. The nun then took him in her arms.
Confronting him, she said, there's another capital down there beneath
the waves. So they plunged to the bottom of the
thousand fathomed sea. Welcome to Stuff to blow your mind

(00:54):
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

(01:19):
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

(01:40):
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

(02:01):
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

(02:22):
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

(02:45):
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

(03:06):
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

(03:28):
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,

(03:51):
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

(04:11):
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

(04:34):
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

(04:54):
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,

(05:17):
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

(05:37):
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

(05:57):
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

(06:21):
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

(06:44):
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

(07:04):
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

(07:25):
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

(07:47):
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,

(08:08):
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

(08:29):
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

(08:52):
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

(09:14):
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

(09:39):
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

(10:00):
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

(10:21):
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

(10:44):
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

(11:06):
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,

(11:28):
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

(11:49):
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

(12:12):
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

(12:37):
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.

(13:00):
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

(13:21):
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,

(13:42):
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

(14:04):
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,

(14:31):
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

(14:51):
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,

(15:14):
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

(15:37):
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

(15:57):
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

(16:18):
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,

(16:42):
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

(17:07):
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

(17:28):
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

(17:52):
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

(18:14):
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

(18:35):
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

(18:56):
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

(19:18):
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

(19:41):
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

(20:03):
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

(20:28):
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

(20:48):
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,

(21:08):
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

(21:29):
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

(21:50):
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

(22:14):
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

(22:37):
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

(22:57):
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

(23:18):
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

(23:41):
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

(24:03):
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.

(24:24):
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

(24:45):
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

(25:07):
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

(25:29):
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.

(25:49):
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.

(26:12):
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

(26:35):
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,

(26:56):
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

(27:16):
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,

(27:38):
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

(27:59):
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

(28:19):
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

(28:41):
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

(29:04):
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,

(29:26):
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

(29:48):
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,

(30:08):
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

(30:31):
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.

(30:53):
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

(31:13):
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

(31:36):
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

(31:56):
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

(32:16):
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

(32:40):
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

(33:01):
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

(33:23):
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

(33:44):
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,

(34:05):
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

(34:26):
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

(34:47):
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,

(35:12):
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.

(35:34):
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

(35:56):
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

(36:18):
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

(36:38):
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.

(37:01):
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,

(37:23):
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

(37:46):
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

(38:07):
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

(38:30):
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

(38:50):
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

(39:12):
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

(39:33):
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

(39:54):
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

(40:16):
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

(40:36):
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,

(40:59):
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

(41:20):
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

(41:41):
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.

(42:02):
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

(42:24):
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

(42:45):
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

(43:07):
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

(43:28):
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

(43:49):
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

(44:10):
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

(44:32):
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

(44:53):
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?

(45:14):
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

(45:34):
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

(45:56):
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

(46:17):
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

(46:37):
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.

(46:59):
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,

(47:19):
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

(47:42):
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

(48:03):
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

(48:23):
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

(48:45):
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

(49:07):
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

(49:27):
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

(49:51):
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

(50:12):
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

(50:35):
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

(50:55):
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,

(51:17):
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

(51:41):
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

(52:02):
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,

(52:24):
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,

(52:49):
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.

(53:10):
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,

(53:32):
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

(53:53):
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.

(54:13):
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

(54:35):
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

(54:57):
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

(55:17):
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

(55:40):
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

(56:03):
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,

(56:24):
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,

(56:44):
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

(57:09):
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

(57:32):
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

(57:53):
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

(58:13):
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?

(58:35):
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,

(58:58):
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

(59:19):
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

(59:40):
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

(01:00:02):
that we will have space for our movie references to breathe.
I can't wait, all right, So hey, in the meantime,
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(01:00:24):
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