Artificial selection

The "artificial selection" reminded me of one thing. This gonna be a bit long story.
When I was a small child my father somehow subscribed a science monthly magazine named 「科学大鑑」. It was filled with interesting pictures that I had never seen. I enjoyed looking at a picture of a woman who had a "third" breast on her armpit or creepy parasites that could be somewhere in my body. One of the most impressive pictures among them was a picture of a crab. It looked exactly like a human's face and that in agony, anger, sadness or all mixed up. It was called Heike crab (平家ガニ) it said. I was shocked and wondered how this could happen naturally. Was it just a result of haphazard trial of creation by Nature?
The answer came unexpectedly 40 years later when I was reading "Cosmos" by Carl Sagan. The following is more or less a gist of what he wrote (a little bit modified).
You know there were two big clans in Japan; Genji and Heike, fighting fiercely with each other for the hegemony of Japan roughly 900 years ago.
Finaly they went into a showdown, naval battle at 壇ノ浦, Japanese inland sea off 山口県, with a still too young emperor on board. The war was fierce and grim. Heike were gradually outmaneuvered. Many were killed and many threw themselves into the sea and drowned.
The emperor on board was a seven-year old boy, 安徳天皇 who was backed by Heike as a symbol of the right rulership for 平家. The grandmother of the Emperor, prepared for the loss of the battle, decided that the young Emperor Antoku would not be captured by the enemy. She told the lovely boy, who looked too inocent to be called Emperor, that they were going to the depths of the ocean capitol. The Emperor understood everything. He put his small hands together. He turned first to the East to say farewell to the god of 伊勢神宮 and then to the West to repeat 南無阿弥陀仏. Then the grand mother took him tightly in her arms, jumped off the ship, floated for a moment between waves and sank with him under the water.
There were dozens of Heike women who survived the war although all the battle ship sank under the water. They were ladies-in-waiting (女官）of the Imperial court and considered "noble" ladies. They reduced themselves to sell flowers and other "favors" to the fishermen near the scene of the battle just to live.
So the memory of the war lingered around that area, tales of the tragic defeat spread both by the witnesses and the women who survived and had children fathered by fishermen, to whom the tales were passed on. The fishermen began to believe that the Heike samurai who threw themselves into the sea, wander the bottoms of the Inland Sea.
There were crabs to be found here with odd and curious patterns on their backs. Some of them disturbingly looked like the face of samurai. When fishermen caught them, they did not have the heart to eat them, instead they returned them to the sea.
How does it come about that the face of a samurai is printed on the back of a crab? The deep grudge of warriors who died in agony somehow possesed the crabs?
The patterns on the crab's carapace are inheritable. But among crabs there are many varieties of patterns that are being inherited; some may look like human faces, some just random patterns. Suppose that a crab, among the distant ancestors of this crab, had by chance a pattern that resembled a face of samurai. Even before the 壇ノ浦 battle, fishermen may not have felt like eating such an ominous-looking crab. So they might have thrown it back. Doing so, without knowing, they were tampering an evolutionary process. If you are a crab and your pattern is nothing interesting to humans, you have a good chance to be eaten. You have little chance to leave your descendants and so your pattern. But if your pattern looks more like human face, the less possible you are eaten and the more chance you have to leave your own pattern.
As the generations passed of fishermen and crabs alike, the crabs with patterns that most resembled a samurai face survived preferentially until eventually there was produced not just a human face, but the doleful and fierce look of samurai in agony as if right before death.
All this has nothing to do with what the crabs want. Selection was imposed from the outside. The more you look like samurai and the more your shell looks agonized, the better are your chances of survival. This inclination of people is considered to have been just strengthened after the 壇ノ浦 battle.
This is a beautiful example of "artificial selection". This case it was carried out unconsciously but most of the cases we are doing this process deliberately as I said yesterday; leaving what we want and destroying what we don't.
It might be all right if we are doing it on a small scale and in a primitive way. But we have no idea what will be effected if six billion people will go on doing this with more and more advanced technologies.
Yet, again, Nature doesn't care where we are going.