Recent decades have witnessed a surge of interest among historians of science and STS scholars alike in attempting to clarify a term that they use so commonly in their analyses that they almost take it for granted: popularization of science. As James Secord puts it in his widely cited "Knowledge in Transit" (2004), historians of science have long ignored the fact that science is in every way a communicative activity. That is to say, in order to better figure out what makes science a universal and authoritative form of knowledge, seemingly free of local contexts, scholars should no longer confine themselves to studying those sites where scientists produce their knowledge. Instead, they should turn their attention to examining how science travels from its sites of production to the general public. Against that backdrop, it is not surprising that Charles Darwin's 1859 On the Origin of Species and its dissemination turn out to be a favorite case used by scholars to clarify the multitude of meanings wrapped up in the term popularization of science. Indeed, for the past decade or so, a great number of studies have shown how a constellation of social and cultural factors shaped ways in which people interpreted and made use of Origin of Species.
