I'm immediately fascinated by what I imagine are core questions explored by this domain. Largely the trade-offs. It's almost like choosing to ship a product with a hard-coded configuration vs. a more complex "discover and self-calibrate" phase.

Would the trade-off be that precocial animals are generally "configured" for the environments in which they've evolved? If I birth (well, not me directly) a foal on the moon, will it adapt to the different gravity in the first hour or is that something that's "built-in" to their programming?

Are these built-ins easy to override or modify? Maybe an animal being precogial doesn't negatively impact its ability to also be adaptive, which I think I'm making a big assumption on already.