We're us" (GOE 15), while too often overlooking the novel's simultaneous preoccupation with what it quite
unprogressively calls "wickedness" and "sin." We have written often about the lesbian lovers in Rodin's Metamorphoses of Ovid, the statue in the Eden manuscript that inspires the sexual experiments of both the Bournes and Sheldons, while giving short shrift to the fact that this work appears at the upper right-hand corner of Rodin's The Gates of Hell--neglecting also that the Bournes and Sheldons see these gates (Rodin's rendering of Dante and answer to Ghiberti's Renaissance Florentine Gates of Paradise) in what Hemingway calls "the beautiful gardens" of the Hotel Biron, since 1919 home of the Musee Rodin (KL/EH 422.1, f3, c2, p1; my emphasis).
Adaptation to the weather, to the inanimate vicissitudes of ice ages and droughts, may well not be progressive: just an aimless tracking of
unprogressively meandering climatic variables.