jbml thln 86b I found compelling, some years ago

THE PHRASE
"evolution lost."

It invoked in my mind both "this view of life" as something precious that we no longer have or at least have placed at moral risk, and, insofar as extinction and thus an end to the evolution of our species seemed much more plausible, the notion of a contest in which the very process of evolution itself had failed. The latter as least was a fallacy, for as Peter J. Richerson & Robert Boyd lucently point out in their book
NOT BY GENES ALONE,
that a cultural pattern may be maladeptive (leading toward ex-tinction rather than species success) hardly means it is not a product of evolution.

In evolutionary terms, the phrase I was looking for (though much less evocative) was doubtless something more like "adaptation lost."

When we say "adaptive," we refer to that which fosters the likelihood of reproduction. Moreover, while we know that extinction is part of evolution, we tend to usually associate evolutionary success with a progression from past to future (hence the mild astonishment of a younger anthropologist colleague at my assertion that I take an evolutionary but not a progressive perspective). We cannot reproduce ourselves in the past ~ or can we?

If you are right that "the past represents the events we can possibly have observed and recorded in memory," then it is certainly true at least that our capacities to observe and record can grow and in THAT sense at least the past expands toward the future.

As Richerson and Boyd predict,
"[m]ore surprises in both past and future climates are virtually a certainty."
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