Kobayashi Masaki's 1964 version of "The Strange Story" is an immortal artistic masterpiece in the history of Japanese cinema. Among them, "No Ear Fangyi" tells the story of the pipa master Fangyi who provokes the ghosts of the Heike samurai by playing and singing "Hirako" and loses his ears dramatically. In order to enhance the artistic effect, Kobayashi Masaki put a lot of effort into reproducing the Battle of Tannoura, which turned the Heike samurai into ghosts, on the screen. The classic tragic feeling will be deeply impressed by those who have seen it. At the end of the naval battle, a voiceover said, since then, this sea has always been haunted by grievances, so that the crabs on the seaside have the faces of the Heike samurai on their backs (picture: Heike crabs washed by the sea). Hehe, I believe that friends of the same age as me will probably have some distant memories when they see this place, right? That's right, when we were in junior high school, Carl Sagan's "Japanese Heike Crab" was included in the universal Chinese language textbook! (Note: This text is taken from Carl Sagan's book "Cosmos". The claim that Heike crabs are artificially selected by fishermen is not original by Sagan, but by Julian Huxley, published in LIFE magazine in 1952. See http://books.google.com/books?id=wVUEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA67。 Also: I noticed that there is a TV version of "Cosmos", I searched and found an episode with the story of Heike crab, http://v.youku. com/v_show/id_XMjQxNDg0ODQ=.html15 seconds to start~) -------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------- The following is the text of the year: Let me tell you a story about a little piece of music in the movement of life on earth . In 1185, the Japanese emperor Andoku was eight years old, and he was the nominal leader of the Heike samurai group. At that time, this group was engaged in a long bloody war with another samurai group, the Gen family samurai group. They all claim to be the orthodox heirs of the Emperor. On April 20 of that year, a decisive naval encounter broke out at Tannori, Inner Kai, with Emperor Ender on board. The Heike side was outnumbered and collapsed, resulting in heavy casualties. Survivors poured into the sea in large numbers to drown. The Emperor's grandmother, Toffee Tanjing, is determined not to let the enemy capture her and Ender. The later situation is recorded in the book "Heike Monogatari": The emperor is just eight years old this year, but he looks young and mature. He was radiant, his long black hair hanging loosely behind his back. He asked the concubine Danjing in panic, "Where are you taking me?" The concubine turned to look at the young monarch, tears streaming down her face... She comforted him while tying his long hair in in his pink robe. The little monarch burst into tears, and the concubine Danjing held him tightly in her arms, saying, "Our palace is in the depths of the sea." Then she sank under the waves with him. The Heike's fleet was wiped out, and only 43 women survived. Forced to make a living, these palace maids had to sell flowers or provide other services to fishermen near the battlefield. The Heike samurai group has all but disappeared from history, but the descendants of former court maids and fishermen have come together to set a festival to commemorate the battle. On April 24th every year, they would go to the Red Wansheng Mausoleum where the emperor was buried in filial piety to hold a commemorative event and watch a performance describing the Battle of Tanyeli, which is still the case to this day. Fishermen say the Heike samurai are still roaming the bottom of the Japanese Inland Sea to this day, in the shape of crabs. Crabs with strange back markings can be found here, and their appearance and shape are strikingly similar to the faces of the warriors. The crabs were returned to the sea when they were caught to commemorate the tragic events in Tan Yeh. The saga raises an interesting question: Why was the samurai's face carved into the crab shell? The answer seems to be that this face shape is made by humans, and the appearance on the crab shell is inherited. Like people, crabs have many different lineages. Suppose that one of the ancestors of this crab happens to have a crab that looks like a human face, even if only slightly. Even before the battle of Tanyeli, the fishermen would not eat it. Lose. When they threw it back into the sea, it had an evolutionary process: if you were a crab and your shell was ordinary, humans would eat you, and the descendants of your lineage would Decrease; if your shell resembles a human face a little, they will throw you back into the sea and your offspring will multiply. The appearance on the crab shell is a big investment for crabs. Over the generations, those crabs with the most samurai-like appearance were uniquely blessed to survive. So the end product is not the face shape of the average person, nor the face of the Japanese, but the stern face of a samurai, all of which have nothing to do with the needs of the crab. Elimination is the result of external effects. The more samurai-like you look, the better your chances of survival, and you end up with lots of samurai crabs. This process described above is called the "artificial selection" process. In the case of the Heike Samurai crab, this process is basically an unconscious selection process by the fishermen. Of course, this process has nothing to do with the crab's wishes. However, humans have been making careful choices about the survival of animals and plants for thousands of years. From infancy, we are surrounded by familiar livestock, fruits, trees and vegetables. Where do these plants and animals come from? Did they once live independently in the wild before being lured to a more comfortable life on the farm? No, the opposite is true, most of them are made by us. Ten thousand years ago, hounds, cows, large ears of corn, etc. did not exist. when we domesticate these When plants and animals—some of which looked nothing like they do today—we controlled their reproduction. In other words, we give priority to breeding those ideal breeds. When we need dogs to herd sheep, we choose breeds that are alert, tame, and possess a certain herding genius, because we can use the dog's genius to watch over groups of prey animals. The reason why cows have large udders is that humans like to eat milk and cheese. The delicious and nutritious corn we eat now has been cultivated over tens of thousands of years from its lean ancestors. In fact, corn has become unable to reproduce without human intervention. Whether it's Heike crabs, hunting dogs, cows, or corn, the essence of artificial selection is that many physiological and behavioral traits of plants and animals are faithfully inherited. For a variety of reasons, humans promote the reproduction of some species and prevent the reproduction of others. The selected species raced to breed first and finally flourished; the unselected species became increasingly rare and even extinct. But since human beings can create new varieties of plants and animals, is it possible that natural human beings have modified wild animals and plants for a short period of time on earth and the evidence provided by fossils, we see very clearly that living things have occurred in billions of years The fundamental change, fossils show us unequivocally: the creatures that once existed in the past have been mass extinction. In Earth's history, far more species have gone extinct than are still alive today, and they are evolutionary terminal guinea pigs. The genetic changes caused by domestication are very rapid. Hares were not domesticated until the beginning of the Middle Ages (bred by French friars because they treated newborn bunnies as fish. So on certain days of the church calendar, rabbit meat was not considered fasting meat). Coffee was domesticated in the 15th century, sweet potato was domesticated in In the 19th century, minks are still in the early stages of domestication. In less than 10,000 years, domestication resulted in an increase in wool production per sheep from 1 kg to 10-20 kg, and milk production per lactating cow from a few hundred milliliters to a million milliliters . If artificial selection can cause so much change in such a short period of time, what kind of change can natural selection cause in billions of years? The colorful biological world is the answer. Evolution is a fact, not a theory. -------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------- ------------------------ This text left a deep impression on me back then, and I never doubted what it said. In any case, the example of Heike Crab is a wonderful explanation of the principle of artificial selection. With nostalgia, after reading "Strange Talk", I went to search for more information about Japanese Heike crabs. I didn't expect such a search, but I tended to think that the story of artificial selection of Japanese Heike crabs is mostly just a beautiful story. rather than facts. According to the wiki (http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%B9%B3%E5%AE%B6%E8%9F%B9 ), the scientific name of Japanese Heikea japonica is Heikea japonica, mainly distributed in Japan, but in China, Korea , Vietnam is also distributed. This raises the first question: If the Japanese Heike crab is the result of artificial selection by Japanese fishermen, how to explain its distribution in China, South Korea, and Vietnam? Under the premise of not violating the theory of artificial selection of fishermen, the only possibility is species migration/invasion, that is, the Heike crab produced in Japan reaches a wide area outside Japan via free crawling in the sea/East Asian trade. It's not entirely impossible, but it always feels very far-fetched. If there are records of Heike crabs in the aquatic biographies of the above-mentioned countries in ancient times, according to the years of these records, we can know whether the artificial selection theory is completely untenable. The second question is that the Battle of Tannoura took place in 1185 ( http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%A3%87%E4%B9%8B%E6%B5%A6%E4%B9% 8B%E6%88%B0 ), Koizumi Yakumo's "Strange Talk" was published in 1904. Since Koizumi Yakumo only compiled Japanese folktales into the book "Strange Talk", the actual spread and formation time of the Heike crab story should be far away. well before 1904. So the question is, is such a short period of time enough to make people choose Heike crabs from 1185? Artificial selection, under ideal conditions, should happen so quickly that it should be obvious to all. Famous people, such as the Siberian silver fox domestication experiment in the last century, have selected a gentle breed with a character close to a domestic dog in just a few decades. But the problem is that Heike crabs are not domesticated. They come from the sea, go to the sea, and the individuals that can be affected by the fishing by fishermen should only account for a very small proportion of the entire Heike crab population. This kind of selection pressure is enough to shape the distribution throughout Japan. Many places (see Japanese wiki, http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%98%E3%82%A4%E3%82%B1%E3%82%AC%E3%83%8B: Is the Heike crab distributed in southern Hokkaido, Sagami Bay, Kii Peninsula, Seto Inland Sea, Ariake Sea, Korean Peninsula, northern China, ベトナムまで, and the East Asia Coastal Area? This is my own question. I am not an expert in aquatic biology, and I am unable to do more historical research, but soon I found that doubts about artificial selection already existed. A representative example is the short essay The Samurai Crab by American aquatic biologist Joel W. Martin: ( https://decapoda.nhm.org/pdfs/3729/3729-001.pdf ) Interested students can read the above Short article, but for students who are too lazy to read, let me summarize Martin's doubts and evidence: 1. About the earliest time of the Heike Crab legend: Martin also has no way to conduct detailed research. But as far as he knows, Heike crabs have appeared in stylized images in the paintings of Ukiyo painter Utagawa Kuniyoshi. Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861), from the age of his life, it can be seen that this legend originated in the 18th century at the latest. In addition, in the Japanese illustrated encyclopedia "Wahan Sancai Yuhui" published in 1716, the figure of the human-faced crab also appeared, but it has another name. The name at that time was "Wuwen Crab", which originated from Qin Wuwen who died in the Yuanhong Rebellion (1331). ( http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/leaf/jn2/136195/m0u/ ) The second is "Shimamura Crab", which is based on Shimamura Yuzheng who died in battle in the fourth year of Xianglu (1531) in the Warring States Period. ( http://www.weblio.jp/content/%E5%B3%B6%E6%9D%91%E8%9F%B9 ). It can be seen that the legend of the human-faced crab has a long history in Japan and is not the patent of the Heike samurai. Although it is difficult to verify the specific time of its appearance, it has a history of hundreds of years and should not be an exaggerated estimate.
[Update: I found two textual research articles "Crab に化した人人たち" written by Professor Naoshima, a folklorist from the Graduate School of Aichi Gakuin University. The first article comprehensively verified the records of various types of human-faced crabs in ancient Japanese documents http:/ /kiyou.lib.agu.ac.jp/pdf/kiyou_02F/02__27F/02__27_98.pdf , the second article is devoted to researching Heike crab http://kiyou.lib.agu.ac.jp/pdf/kiyou_02F/02__28F/02__28_216.pdf . The Japanese mythology wiki at the University of Vienna https://www.univie.ac.at/rel_jap/kami/Heikegani has a German translation and can be viewed by machine translation.
Professor Ojima pointed out that there are a large number of synonyms and foreign objects with the same name in these Japanese crabs with different names; the saying of Hei's crab has already appeared in the book "The Story of Dust Tombs " written in the mid-16th century. ] 2. About the human face pattern on the back of the Heike crab: As an aquatic biologist, Martin pointed out that the human face pattern on the back of the Heike crab is a muscle attachment point, which has adaptive significance. Corresponding to its adaptive significance, several close relatives of the Heike crab, whether distributed in Japan or not, have similar human face patterns! This means that the human face pattern is under the pressure of natural selection, and its generation does not require the help of the fishermen's mercy. Martin quoted Japanese aquatic scholars as saying that there are at least 17 species of human-faced crabs in the Pacific region, which are widely distributed and have corresponding names and legends in various countries. For example, in China, it is called "grimace crab". What's more, fossil evidence suggests that close relatives of the Heike crab appeared long before human activity began. In addition, it is also the most deadly point. Japanese fishermen do not actually eat Heike crabs, which are only about 3cm in size! It can be seen that the artificial selection of Heike crab patterns is mostly untenable. The explanation in the article "Japanese Heike Crab" is a beautiful story, but the authenticity is not high. However, Martin pointed out in his short article that although the story may not be true, the Heike samurai will not be forgotten - before 1990, the scientific name of the Heike crab was Dorippe japonica, and later because it was discovered that it and other species of the Dorippe genus have some Important distinction, create a new genera to accommodate it. When naming the new genus, scientists from the Netherlands and the United States chose Heikea for it. Heike, which is the Roman alphabet of Ping's.
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