Katherine Ann Westabout

Anyone who has spent too much time in the tropics is sure to go that way. It's called going troppo. Keen observers of their friends and neighbours in Cairns and Darwin will notice it but of course it is much harder to detect in oneself. That is perhaps why Charles of aforementioned locality found it so difficult to confirm that all was not as it was made out to be by the scientific community of his time and took so many years to publish his Origin of the Species.
Now I have spent many years of my life in places such as Cairns and Darwin. Not Darwin itself but if you substitute South Pacific Lager for Darwin Stubbies Port Moresby runs a close second. And I have stood on the deck of a ship and gazed in awe at the same things Darwin saw. At the mighty glaciers of the Beagle Canal carving out the fjords of Southern Chile. At the strange and altered life forms of the Galápagos Islands. At the volcanic peaks and surrounding reefs like Tahiti and Bora Bora and the coral atoll of Ahe where we met that great yachtsman Bernard Moitessier.
And once again I enter the tropics and watch a dirty brown sun fade into the dismal North Atlantic, obscured by the same dust that Darwin collected from the decks of the Beagle. Infusoria of many different types he was told by a Fellow of The Royal Society. Bull dust. Or maybe camel dust. But Infusoria - No. And I think of Bernard on his tropical island nurturing his sweet potatoes in arid sandy soil, snaring fish in his staked out trap and pondering on the meaning of our modern existence. Bernard went back to Paris without an answer - the question was too difficult. Darwin went back to London and his answers seem all too obvious to us now.
Mankind is still asking similar questions. Like how did it all begin,where are we going,how will it end, what is love, what's for breakfast? The last two are best answered by Womankind as they have an innate ability in such matters. " If you haven't worked that out for yourself by now it's too late for me to tell you. Bacon and eggs."
The first three are the realm of that pseudoscience Astrophysics which is based on many implausible assumptions amongst which are
The speed of light is constant
The Law of Universal Gravitation

E=MCsquared
Which leads to the absurdities
The Big Bang
Black Holes
Anti Matter , and so on
To future generations this will be as risible as the creation of said Womankind from the rib of a day old boy but such was the science that confronted Darwin.
As the tropical sun of the morrow morn bores through my brain these statements will be elaborated upon and some of the questions answered. In reverse order Porridge with Dates. Spam and