How?
In Jones' work, he writes ...
The archives of the rocks is a series of snapshots, taken at long intervals with a badly focused camera.
Copernicus and Galileo put an end to the idea that space could be measured in human terms.
The very title of his (Darwin's) greatest work -- On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life -- joins the course of change within a species to the grander process that causes new forms to appear. DNA is a river from the pase. If the trickle seen today is driven by selection, why should its majestic passage through time not obey the same rules.
It is possible to argue that all the great leading facts in paleontology seem simple to follow on the theory of descent with modification. Old forms are supplanted by new and improved forms, produced by the laws of variation that still act around us, and preserved by natural selection. Like the bed of a great river, the course of evolution is in its substance simple.