Pretty important to remember loved ones, who your wife is, who your children are.
Remembering where you live, how to hunt, it's important to remember that putting your hand in the fireplace will burn you etc...
Memory is very important. Especially in caveman days.

Because when you need to fap but don't have access to porn you can always recall a titty you saw once. Evolution is a truly amazing thing.

Memory allowed the primitive brain to evolve past it's basic operations: fight, flight, food, and fornication.

Because otherwise I wouldn't remember to never shake leo-j's hand. God is good.

Because God.

without memory there is no learning...you have to learn things....without learning you do the same mistake over and over again.

While I agree human go overboard on memory - but many of us are sentient. You kind of need a memory to have the perspective to apply large concepts. I'm glad we do, or we couldn't speak, learn, or an enjoy a good well developed story.

But even simple animals and insects seem to have memory. When bees do that dance to tell them where the flowers are they need a memory to know where to go.  Some worms can learn. You need it to learn anything - language, structured thinking, not to touch hot things, without it an organism is basically an amoeba.

Without it everything all just stimulus then response. When one gets beyond a rather basic animal it becomes crucial for survival.  In evolution it would give your offspring an important advantage over others.

Lemme put it this way. The Limbic System is like the BIOS of a computer. It's functions are hardwired. It's the basic instructions we all start with in life. It gives all creatures the ability to fight, flee, find food, and fuck. Obviously it's advantageous to do more than this. So a path (which evolved into a super highway) of information was linked between the frontal lobe and the Limbic system. This is like your northbridge to your CPU. The frontal lobe can process more efficiently with memory and there you have it.

Uh ... I knew the answer to this ... uh, can't quite remember .... wait ... what was the question again? ... Ooooo, something shiny! (wanders away)

I'm not an evolutionist. I'm an agnostic theorist. But obviously advantageous traits get passed down. I also worked around dead bodies for two years so I learned a thing or two about meat bags.