''Factored from a quote attributed to '''J.E.R. Staddon''', ''Adaptive Behavior and Learning.'' Cambridge University Press (1983) p. 395...''

'''It is no surprise that learning plays a rather small part in the lives of most animals.'''
* Most animals are small and do not live long; flies, fleas, bugs, nematodes, and similar modest creatures comprise most of the fauna of the planet. A small, brief animal has little reason to evolve much learning ability. 
* Because it is small, it can have little of the complex neural apparatus needed; because it is short-lived, it has little time to ''exploit'' what it learns. 
* Life is a tradeoff between spending time and energy learning new things, and exploiting things already known. The longer an animal's life space, and the more varied its niche, the more worthwhile it is to spend time learning. 

'''Similarly with groups versus teams''' 
* Groups are short-lived, one-off, simple conglomerations of people to solve a directed task (the SuperordinateGoal). 
* Teams are much longer-term, self-reinforcing, multiple-situation relationships between people. 
* A group does not bother learning (except for its directed task), often just calling upon the existing experience of its members. 
* A team, on the other hand, actively learns new things (or at least encourages its members to learn more) so that it can adapt to future circumstances it will encounter. 
* In this way, a group is like a lower order animal, whereas a team is like a higher order animal. 

Derived from LearningExploitationTradeOff on MeatballWiki.

The quote has been refactored to make it appropriate here in the context of how knowledge is acquired and extended. See KnowledgeProliferation. 

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When I saw this page name, I thought it was going to be about interns (articling students, etc.) trading off the learning experience for being exploited by their employers.

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CategoryKnowledge