Primitive?

[My First Timbs]

can you tell how primitive something is by how many progeny it makes in ratio to how many survive?
Oak trees live forever but they drop thousands of acorns in the hopes that a single digit number will survive
thoughts?

it depends on how one defines "primitive". If one is purely going by the phylogenetic and evolutionary scale, then it is reasonable to correlate # of offspring/progeny with eukaryotic "complexity".

However, one must be wary of terms like the such because they are biased from a human (mammalian) pespective.

On the other side, one could argue that # of progeny is not a defiitive marker of the eukaryotic complexity scale, but rather merely an adaptation to environmental stressors.

For example, the human, typically gives birth to 2.3 offspring ( a function of the number of mammary glands!), however, creatures not bound by a function of the # of mammary glands or those that face a different environmental stressor by way of predation more than likely will give birth to or yield more offspring to account for the environmental stress. This does not mean in a biological sense for ex that humans are "less primitive" than oak trees.