...and and and and and and...Bacteriophages always feel so robotic and inorganic. Like, they are just little robot guys. How did nature make little robot guys. Why couldn't I have been a little robot guy.
Nature can do this but can't make werewolves? Very homophobic.
Arrow@Capital Granted, a lot of animals feel kind of robotic once you start to test them.
The one I remember is a specific species of hunting wasps, where they will leave their burrow, go find prey, pull it back to their lair. Once there, they release the prey item, go down and inspect their burrow to make sure nothing else started squatting while they were away, then they go out and retrieve the prey item, drag it in, and eat it.
If a researcher moves the prey item away during the inspection, when the wasp returns, it will take off in search of the prey, find it, drag it back to the burrow...and then inspect it again.
This can be repeated for hundreds of iterations; the wasp has evolved essentially a very simple if-then-else program for its own survival, but any disruption causes it to repeat steps again and again. It is incapable of processing that it has done this before; once it takes off in search of prey, it simply must inspect the burrow on return.