[gobdovan]

Technically, every adaptation is evolutionary history, but not every evolutionary historical pattern is an adaptation.

The distinction is very sharp and clear: adaptation is not a mere property discovered in the organism, but an exciting post-hoc human classification of evolutionary history. It's powered by the grand human psyche doing what it does best: projecting competitive, status-oriented social psychology onto non-human biological processes.

If you ever wondered "how dare biology fail to conform to a clear narrative easily processed by the human mind?", adaptation fixes exactly that.