The possession of wings in the later stage created a very different environmental situation, so the selective pressures on the winged stage are very different from those in the pre winged stage. These cause a split in the evolutionary environment of pre and post winged stages, causing selection for further divergent trait acquisition in the transitional stage during wing development.
Not an entomologist though, so if anyone has a better understanding I’d be grateful.
Vertebrates go through several stages in their development while in the egg (or placental sack, which stands in for the egg). The develop a head, spine, and tail initially. Then they add front limbs and finally rear limbs. Frogs hatch from their eggs prior to the limb development stage and retain that neotenous legless form while tadpoles. They are essentially hatched as embryos and don’t assume their adult form until later.
Which shouldn’t feel so alien to us because human childhoods are a period of much slower growth than you see in other animals. Not a pause but still. IIRC it’s speculated that slowed growth is to give time for the brain to mature and to learn but either way it’s interesting to think about. If we grew the way dogs and cows do we’d be fully grown by around 10 years old.
The pupa internally "gestates" the adult as a parthenogenetic clone-child; the adult being gestated, absorbs the pupal parent's entire body for nutrients — and, crucially, the pupal parent's body allows this absorption of its entire body, producing no immune response to it, because they have the same DNA. As with a cyclic parasite, you get two different complete lifecycles, that are each born, live, and die from the same genetic program, given a different epigenetic kickstart, in a back-and-forth cycle.
The obvious advantage of this process is you can regenerate a body if your current one is no longer suitable, due to disease, degeneration, or even dysphoria.
It isn’t really suicide because your consciousness isn’t extinguished, you just end up unconscious for a bit while you restructure.
We only miss the memory, that which makes us individual human beings. I wonder where the hell does it go. That's is marvelous to me. Where does the memory go?
A river is like a memory: water generally flows the same way down them, some days stronger some days drier, and the more they are used, the more they shift their course.
Memory is just a word for the human experience of localized state. There is a universal state that we experience a small piece of as we live. Though our experience of it ceases when we die, the state of the universe continues its natural course, with no loss of continuity, just a phase shift.
The experience of human life is like a river. At first we are small mountain trickles, barely aware of our existence. As we make our way through the middle of our lives, we are self-important rivers, providing an ecosystem to those around us, sometimes with others flowing their experience into ours, and sometimes as we give our experience to others; some amount evaporating to who knows where and some amount being replenished by rains, growing ever larger.
Towards the end, we either become stuck in lakes, or we are like large idle bays, full of experience, most of us moving now with less fundamental "purpose." Lake or bay, eventually we disperse back to the ocean of existence.
There are those cool liquefaction burial places though that will dissolve you in a strong acid (or base?). Your family is left with some you juice that they can flush down the toilet (or drink in a cocktail, I suppose).
Maybe the Tibetans and their sky burials with vultures eating your fresh meat is the way to go.