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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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.
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