ALL THINGS BIG AND SMALL 2.0

  What would it take for a leaf-eating, house-cat-sized animal on a quiet island to turn into a monkey hunter? I built a small world to find out, and you can watch the answer unfold in your browser. Entikayrus (The creature's name is a play on my intitals: NTKrus) is invented, but the factors in the process that transforms it are real: variation, inheritance and natural selection, climbing, leaping, diet,   Nobody tells it to climb, grow fangs or change its diet. It happens because some animals eat, escape and breed better than others. The idea Evolution by natural selection takes thousands of generations, but this computer simulation compresses 6000 generations into a few minutes. Basically, animals which have slightly different physical attributes that enable them to find more food, or avoid being eaten, will be more successful in breeding and passing on their genes. The young inherit their parents' differences. Repeat for a few thousand generations , and we will have...

   Entikayrus Ancestor Today, I start Project Entikayrus- a simulation of evolution by natural selection. Design and build done with AI (Anthropic Claude Opus 5.5). I am creating a cat-like creature called Entikayrus (name derived from NTK, the initials of my name).    This project builds a full-colour, interactive animation showing how natural selection turns Entikayrus, a plant-eating cat-sized island creature, into an arboreal monkey hunter, while its monkey prey coevolves in response. It will take me 8 sessions to complete Project Entikayrus. The story Entikayrus lives on an isolated, forested tropical island. The island has no competitors for its food and no predators that hunt it. A population of small, quick monkeys lives in the lower branches of the trees. The ancestor. Ancestral Entikayrus is about the size of a house cat, roughly 4 kg. It eats leaves, fruit, shoots and fallen seeds, mostly on the ground and in low shrubs. It has grinding teeth, a long ...

The purpose of Evolution and Natural Selection is to reward those characteristics in a species that enhance its ability to survive [and penalize those characteristics which are do not contribute to the survival quotient]. So the original giraffe’s neck grew longer and longer as Nature favored those giraffes which had long-neck genes. Because a long neck meant the ability to reach the leaves on the higher branches of the Acacia trees on which the giraffes fed, longer neck giraffes ate more, were healthier, and were more able to find mates. The genes which promoted the long necks were passed on, and over the generations, the necks of giraffes grew longer and longer. In general, animals evolved to have characteristics which enabled them to more successfully find food, find a mate, or adapt to the climate or geographical conditions of their environment. But Dogs are unique in that in they evolved to have characteristics that endeared them more to Man. Of course there were working dogs and ...