I don't remember the name of the story or the book I got it out of. I just remember it was an old book of collected sci-fi stories. It had some of the classic shorts like "A Sound of Thunder" and "R.U.R.". The premise of the story I'm looking for is as follows: two guys go to a deserted island with boxes of assorted metal parts and a small mechanical crab that one of the guys created. They let the crab loose, and it goes around building copies of itself until there's hundreds of small mechanical crabs running around. And when all the metal parts are used up, the crabs are programmed to then turn on each other and fight to the death, and the stronger crab uses the parts from the weaker to improve itself. Survival of the fittest. This continues until there's one huge super-crab, and it goes after the inventor for the metal fillings in his teeth, and the inventor dies. So....anyone?
Found it. Someone on another forum found a site with the story. It's called "Crabs on the Island" by Anatoly Dneprov. It's a good read.
