mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the most highly evolved of us all?

[drawing by Doug Millison]

Insects are marvels of creation with a body plan utterly different from ours. If if were not for them and their arthropod kin (crabs, spiders, scorpions) could we even imagine that it is possible to wear one's skeleton externally, cast it off occasionally, and exchange it for a new one? Could we ever have dreamed of organisms changing completely from a worm-like form eating leaves to a brilliantly colored flying marvel, or metamorphosing from a squat, creeping, aquatic troglodyte to the world's most versatile flyer able to snatch mosquitos out of the air? Could we conceive of being born ready to respond "perfectly" to amazing details of one's environment, without having to spend a lifetim slowly acquiring the appropriate responses by learning? Contemplating these incredibly diverse gems of the natural world, one is impressed with the realization that, seen objectively, insects are perhaps the most, or one of the most, highly evolved forms of life. Given the hundreds of millions of years that they have been in existence on this earth, and the very short time, often measured in weeks, not decades, they need to produce a new generation, it is plain to see that insects have had the opportunity to evolve considerably more than we have. They evolved flight, building architecture, and complex social systems probably hundreds of millions of years before any other organisms on earth had done so. Their amazing diversity and the perfection of design seem to be ample evidence for their high degree of evolutionary success.

…from: The Thermal Warriors by Bernd Heinrich.