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Darwin was the second son of society doctor Robert Waring Darwin and of Susannah Wedgwood. Darwin’s mother died when he was eight, and he was cared for by his three elder sisters.
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expanded it in 1844, but he had no immediate intention of publishing it. He wrote Emma a letter in 1844 requesting that, if he died, she should pay an editor £400 to publish the work.
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This sparked his interest in the evolution of diverging male and female forms from an original hermaphrodite creature.
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he experimented to prove that they could survive ocean crossings to start the process of speciation on islands. Then he kept fancy pigeons, to see if the chicks were more like the ancestral rock dove than their own bizarre parents. Darwin perfected his analogy of natural selection with the fancier’s “artificial selection,” as he called it. He was preparing his rhetorical strategy, ready to present his theory.
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it was not until two decades later that he finally gave it full public expression.
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