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I would recommend reading "Sex on Six Legs: Lessons on Life, Love, and Language from the Insect World" by Marlene Zuk. It's a truly wonderful book about insects (and spiders too), about their evolution, and about how little brain power is required to display complex behavior. Here are a few of my favorite, more on the philosophical side, quotes from the book: Insects bring home the uneasy truth that you don't need a big brain to do big
things, and that in turn makes us question how the mind and, dare to say it,
the spirit, are related to the brain. It even makes us question what it means
to be human. What does it mean to have complex behavior? Does it mean you are
smart?
Natural selection can produce what looks uncannily like intelligent thought or
emotion but is no more than the relentless culling of minute variations in genetic
makeup, generation after generation, for millions of years. Not only that, but
insects too have small personalities, with some showing boldness in new situations
and some hanging back with what looks an awful lot like shyness. It's turning out
that we haven't cornered the market on individuality, either.
Insects are starting to answer the question of "What does it take?"—to have a
personality, to learn, to teach others, to change the world around them—with the
humbling and perplexing answer, "Not much." Humbling because they do these things
with brains the size of a pinhead, and perplexing because if that's all it takes,
what does that mean for us, with our gigantic forebrains and exhaustingly long
periods of childhood dependency?
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