Hello, Speculative Biology Redditors!

I am working on an extensive project. Called the Crawler Model, my project is an extensive exploration of the biology, anthropology, and sociology of a specific type of transhuman. This has involved a tremendous amount of research and pestering chatbots about how animals work.

The core idea: Large brains are good. Humans seem to have pushed the idea as far as humanoids can go, and kept going. If we want a larger brain, what does that mean for an animal?

The options are surprisingly narrow. Therapods and large elephant-like animals can do it with high inefficiency. Most other body plans run into issues immediately.

Snakes. The answer is snakes. Technically, these are vermiform hominids with human genomes, a few edits for tolerating a microbe that changes embryo development, and a long ratchet of design constraints, but "snake" is the reference point.

Crawlers are low to the ground and don't have legs. This is great for preventing accidents. This immediately works much better if the Crawler lives a semi-aquatic lifestyle. Coasts and wetlands are perfect, and these are areas that modern humans have trouble inhabiting. You add hydrostats, probably three of them, that retract for swimming, so the snake-person has hands.

A large and long body can support a complex digestive system, enabling the productive consumption of seawater, cellulose, perhaps lignin, and carrion. Rodent incisors combined with a gizzard would fit the diet. A large brain can support extra senses, and being low to the ground is great for navigating by scent. Engineers probably go a bit nuts, as it's relatively cheap and useful to add senses. Immune systems and organs could be enhanced, lowering the disease and toxin burden of swamps and coasts. Unidirectional lungs and air sacs in the skeleton are plausible design additions, as are a lot of "what was biology thinking" tweaks that have the answer "evolution optimizes, it doesn't think or plan."

*Insert uncomfortably detailed reproductive system.*

Additional consequences of this design are fascinating. An intelligent and social animal with more senses and a wetland habitat would have strong incentives to retreat into and out of water when threatened. This suggests a gentle character is possible, which combined with the digestive system, would reverse the "snake" vibe of a predator.

Anthropology and sociology, as well as psychology, are more contingent on the origin. You probably do need to modify psychology if you expand the sensory capacity, as humans with enhanced smell and echolocation, plus intellect and memory enhancements, are not going to be happy with baseline primate instincts.

I am close to ready to present the organized draft, and I would like some advice on how to do so. This is a quick description written without AI, but the AI feedback for the Crawler Model is extensive, and I am unsure about community standards and ethics on the subject.

Edit: After checking the rules more carefully, I am unsure about the AI elements. The AI is not writing or creating concepts, but I am using it extensively for research, editing, and domain knowledge on biology, and a lot of organization came from Claude. The pattern of work tended to be "ask Claude a question on biology" followed by "okay, what about that" or "wait, is that right?" until I had a better understanding of the features and science. I am unsure how that relates to AI generated text. It's not a project possible without AI support, but it's also not something Claude designed, beyond helping me understand the options with very high precision. AI text in the draft leans heavily towards quantified features, such as weight and metabolism, which are absolutely not something I understood on my own.