Insect

Insects run the world's most successful franchise model. With over a million identified species, they've proven that being small, numerous, and expendable beats being large, rare, and robust. Each generation is a disposable prototype—rapid iteration with minimal sunk cost. Where mammals invest heavily in few offspring, insects deploy at scale and let natural selection sort the winners. This is r-selection in its purest form: maximize reproduction, minimize per-offspring investment, accept high mortality as the cost of rapid adaptation. A single termite queen produces millions of offspring; most die, but enough survive to colonize new territory. The strategy isn't wasteful—it's antifragile. High mortality at the individual level enables rapid evolution at the population level. Insects also pioneered true division of labor. Social insects—ants, bees, termites—discovered that sterile workers supporting a reproductive queen outcompetes generalist competitors. This eusociality looks counterintuitive: why would individuals sacrifice reproduction? The answer is genetic accounting: workers share 75% of genes with sisters, making nepotism mathematically optimal. It's the biological proof that in certain conditions, specialization and hierarchy beat individual autonomy. The business parallels are striking. Franchise models replicate standardized units across territories—each location is expendable, but the system is robust. Gig economy platforms deploy millions of individual workers with minimal per-worker investment. Social media companies treat user-generated content the way ant colonies treat worker ants: individually worthless, collectively valuable. When exploring insects in this section, look for: scale strategies (how does quantity substitute for quality?), division of labor (when does specialization beat generalism?), and colony-level selection (when do group dynamics override individual optimization?).