Absent childhood, animals must rely more fully on hardware, and therefore be less flexible. Among migratory bird species, those that are born knowing how, when, and where to migrate—those that are migrating entirely with instructions they were born with—sometimes have wildly inefficient migration routes. These birds, born knowing how to migrate, don’t adapt easily. So when lakes dry up, forest becomes farmland, or climate change pushes breeding grounds farther north, those birds that are born knowing how to migrate keep flying by the old rules and maps. By comparison, birds with the longest
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