Comment by HarHarVeryFunny

There are many factors playing into "survival of the fittest", and energy conservation is only one. Animals build mental models to predict the world because this superpower of seeing into the future is critical to survival - predict where the water is in a drought, where the food is, and how to catch it, etc, etc.

The animal learns as it encounters learning signals - prediction failure - which is the only way to do it. Of course you need to learn/remember something before you can use that in the future, so in that sense it's "ahead of time", but the reason it's done that way because evolution has found that learning patterns will ultimately prove beneficial.