“Capt. Joe,” who writes a blog of coastal life in the fishing town of Gloucester, Massachusetts, recently brought to my attention a slide show he’d compiled of mutant lobsters and crabs.

In the course of hauling their traps, lobstermen handle what can often amount to thousands of crustaceans a day. I remember, from my days working on a lobster boat, how I’d occasionally encounter a lobster that had some sort of genetic mutation

—a deformed claw, a unique color scheme, like the ones in Capt. Joe’s freak show.

I guess what struck me about that experience is that it makes the whole notion of Darwinian evolution much less abstract. When you witness genetic variation like that in the course of your workaday life, you can easily imagine how a lobster with, say, a double-pronged claw, or better camouflage, might have an advantage, and then pass that on to its offspring.

By the same token, though, it’s also easy to see how natural selection would be a utterly random, unplanned, and inefficient process. It’s hard to imagine any intelligence behind the design of some of Capt. Joe’s mutant friends.

Sometimes, even a lobster’s sex undergoes mutation, as I noted a while back in my blog entry, “Attack of the Technicolor Transgender Mutant Lobster.” Makes me wonder if a half-male, half-female lobster might not put the entire process of evolution out of business.

Text is copyright © 2008 by Trevor Corson. All rights reserved.