Darwin studied bees and ants in his own garden. One of the reasons he may have held back from revealing his ideas about evolution was the problem of cooperation in social insects.

In Galapagos he found a remarkable population of plants, birds and reptiles that had developed in isolation from the mainland, but often differed on almost identical islands next door to one another and whose characteristics he could only explain by a gradual transformation of the various species.

During his voyages on The Beagle, Darwin could finally indulge himself. He ate the iguanas he studied on the Galapagos. The giant tortoise was famous among sailors for its delicious meat, and Darwin, who ate a few of them, loved the buttery taste. Alas, today the tortoise is endangered and can’t be eaten.

When in the Galapagos, Charles Darwin and his Beagle chums ate a couple of dozen giant tortoises, tossing their empty shells over board en route to Tahiti. But in his Narrative of the voyage, captain Robert FitzRoy made it clear that a few small tortoises had survived. “Several were brought alive to England,” he wrote.

Darwinism is a theory of biological evolution developed by the English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and others, stating that all species of organisms arise and develop through the natural selection of small, inherited variations that increase the individual’s ability to compete, survive, and reproduce.

Many people seem to think NASA has secret training rooms in which gravity can be turned off. Aside from the long-running Anti Gravity column in Scientific American, however, there is no such thing as antigravity. As of yet, no technology exists to neutralize the pull of gravity.