Evolution is not a gradual process. We now speak of punctuated evolution, which refers to different rates of evolution. Human institutions also evolve, albeit slowly because they are inwardly driven. Even though we think of museums in material terms of buildings and things, they are in fact places of human ideas. The objects of nature give rise to human ideas about nature.
Ideas give rise to the objects created by humans.
So museums are the physical manifestation of human ideas. Too often that very physicalness obscures the fact that a museum is an ever-evolving human concept. The concept of a museum goes back to Plato and Socrates in Greece and to Ptolemy in Egypt. They taught by using objects they had gathered systematically. Later in the 18th and 19th century, United States colleges and universities built their natural science programs around cabinets of natural history, and art museums were often an integral part of early collegiate curricula.