Be Johann Sebastian Bach, not Charles Darwin

What’s the difference between Bach and Darwin? Both were preternaturally gifted and widely known early in life. Both attained permanent fame posthumously. Where they differed was in their approach to the midlife fade. When Darwin fell behind as an innovator, he became despondent and depressed; his life ended in sad inactivity. When Bach fell behind, he reinvented himself as a master instructor. He died beloved, fulfilled, and—though less famous than he once had been—respe...

 Embryonic Recapitulation

By considering the embryological structure of man - the homologies which he presents with the lower animals - the rudiments which he retains - and the reversions to which he is liable, we can partly recall in imagination the former condition of our early progenitors; and we can approximately place them in their proper position in the zoological series. We thus learnt that man is descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habit, and an in...

 Birds to Reptiles

Because reptiles appear in the fossil record before birds, we can guess that the common ancestor of birds and reptiles was an ancient reptile, and would have looked like one. We now know that this common ancestor was a dinosaur. Its overall appearance would give few clues that it was indeed a “missing link”—that one lineage of descendants would later give rise to all modern birds, and the other to more dinosaurs. Truly birdlike traits, such as wings and a large breastbone for anchoring ...

 Darwin Considers Intermediaries Between Species

I have found it difficult, when looking at any two species, to avoid picturing to myself, forms directly intermediate between them. But this is a wholly false view; we should always look for forms intermediate between each species and a common but unknown progenitor; and the progenitor will generally have differed in some respects from all of its modified descendants.

 DNA as Evidence of Common Ancestry

By sequencing the DNA of various species and measuring how similar these sequences are, we can reconstruct their evolutionary relationships. This is done by making the entirely reasonable assumption that species having more similar DNA are more closely related—that is, their common ancestors lived more recently. These molecular methods have not produced much change in the pre-DNA-era trees of life: both the visible traits of organisms and their DNA sequences usually give the same informatio...