The wonderful world of insects (opens in new tab)

The really interesting question is why don't we see these amazingly detailed and precise parasitic mechanisms elsewhere, like in mammals? Are we just doing a terrible job of finding them, or is there something more interesting going on? Del Giudice recently published a paper arguing that the baroque complexity of non-insect nervous systems may in part be an anti-parasite mechanism, by making it too hard for a distributed group of small simple parasites to find hacks: "Invisible Designers: Brain Evolution Through the Lens of Parasite Manipulation" https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/selection/2019-delguidic... , Del Giudice 2019 (discussion: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/08/19/maybe-your-zoloft-stop... ).

Maybe, but that just makes us bigger, more complicated robots because we too have our behavior influenced by parasites and viruses.