Mammals, often, need to be taught by their parents skills and behaviours. This doesn’t seem to be the case with insects which are pretty much “Programmed” to live how they are meant to. Why?
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Mammals have instincts too, just like insects. We’d eat, sleep and mate without learning how to. Learning is more flexible, but takes time and requires a larger and more malleable brain. It’s also more useful if you live a longer life.
Mammals have much more complicated behavior and much fewer offspring than insects. If conditions change, insects can adapt their instinctive behavior simply through natural selection. Mammals can adapt by learning new complex behaviors and teaching them to their children.
Pre-programming behaviors into the brain makes that same creature less adaptable later.
Mammals are born with few instinctual behaviors so they need to learn and practice things. This makes them bad babies, but very adaptable adults.
Insects don’t get any more capable as they age. They don’t really “learn” things over the course of their short lives, nor do they particularly need to. They also don’t much care if 98% of their siblings die as larvae, because there’s 4000 of them.
Two different survival strategies – make one really good, long lived, and adaptable offspring, or just churn out thousands of low-effort spawn and assume some will survive.
Some collective insects learn skills from their elders. Bees, for example: newly hatched bees are given the task of cleaning the hive of debris. Later on, they are taught to forage and spend the next part of their life gathering nectar and pollen. Then later on in their life cycle, they tend to the eggs, larvae and queen.
Nature is great in that it is not always so clean-cut.
Mammals have plenty of instinctual behaviors too. Feeding, mating, swimming, keeping warm, keeping dry, social behaviors (think how dogs know how to engage each other pretty well), and I could go on. However, mammals generally have much more complex behavioral repertoires than, say, insects as per your example. This leads to some room for more complex learned behavior. It is however quite difficult to prove that complex behaviors are learned from watching parents or are actually also instinctual when faced with certain contexts. For instance, a lab born and raised rodent, deprived of sand and maternal care all it’s life, will still burrow when exposed to sand. It didn’t need to learn, it was instinctual. I do believe mammals do have the capacity to learn from each other, but I think it’s rarer than you might think. So much of behavior is powerfully instinctual.
Nature only improves things that are necessary for survival or add a benefit that outweighs the cost. Learning is extremely beneficial but only under certain circumstances. If you only live for a year, you’re not gonna learn enough to make much of a difference. Your only purpose is to mate and continue the species, after that, what happens to you is irrelevant. So if you live in an environment where a single mistake is deadly, you need all the hard coded instincts you can get to survive long enough to mate. Life is an arms race and if your species decides to spend time and energy developing larger and more complex brains, you’re gonna be out competed by the insects that got larger teeth instead.
You make a lot of sacrifices by developing a brain that can learn. You lose a lot of hard coded instincts, you need a lot more resources to feed that brain, and you have a development period where you know very little. Learning only really works when you have room to grow. That’s why most smarter animals tend to have longer lifespans and are more social species (of course there are exceptions but they tend to lean this way). So if you live a solitary and short life, learning will serve no actual purpose since almost any lesson you learn will be a fatal one, and even if you do survive it won’t be passed onto your offspring.
Although the biggest reason that insects don’t learn the same way mammals do, is that their brain simply isn’t complex enough. Insects are very basic creatures, they have simple nervous and respiratory systems. They are limited by their size and can’t develop a brain complex enough to learn like mammals do, even if they could develop one, they’d be unable to sustain it with the oxygen and nutrients it needs to grow.
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