“Icarus’s father, Daedalus, made wings that allowed them to fly away from their island prison. The exhilarated Icarus forgot warnings and soared too close to the sun, melting the wax that secured the feathers, and he fell to his death. After Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, writers and artists such as Herbert Draper took up his theme of origins, man’s mythical history and struggles between animal and human nature. Darwin’s book was optimistic about the future evolution of humankind, but it also introduced new ideas of its past.”