Crabs re-invent the insect nose, according to an article in BBC News 25 Jan 2005. Robber crabs are large land dwelling crabs that live on islands in the Indian Ocean, where they are noted for helping themselves to any smelly food objects left lying around. They are nocturnal and depend on their sense of smell to find food and make their way around. As they are completely adapted to life on land they have completely different smell organs from the marine crabs they supposedly evolved from. A team of scientists led by Marcus Stensmyr of Swedish University of Agricultural Science studied the land crabs’ smell organs and found they worked in an almost identical way to insect smell organs, even though insects beat crabs onto land by nearly 400 million years of evolution. Such similarities in distantly related creatures are called “convergent evolution”. Stensmyr commented that this crab’s smell organ “nicely illustrates how similar selection pressures result in similar adaptation”.
Editorial comment: In the real world, natural selection has only been observed to eliminate creatures that are not already adapted to the environment they find themselves in. “Convergent evolution” is a meaningless piece of jargon that simply means organisms living in similar environments have similar structures and functions. It does not explain anything. Selection pressures have never been observed to create completely new and different structures. The fact that different types of animals living in similar environments have similar structures and functions, is evidence that an intelligent Creator designed them to both work in the environment he placed them in. (Ref. adaptation, design, olfaction)