Darwin and the Barnacle

Darwin and the Barnacle
Author: Rebecca Stott
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2003
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780393057454

Tells the story of the part played by Darwin's eight-year study of barnacles and how the examination of this tiny marine organism contributed to the development of his theory of evolution.

Science in the Marketplace

Science in the Marketplace
Author: Aileen Fyfe
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 421
Release: 2007-09-10
Genre: Science
ISBN: 022615002X

The nineteenth century was an age of transformation in science, when scientists were rewarded for their startling new discoveries with increased social status and authority. But it was also a time when ordinary people from across the social spectrum were given the opportunity to participate in science, for education, entertainment, or both. In Victorian Britain science could be encountered in myriad forms and in countless locations: in panoramic shows, exhibitions, and galleries; in city museums and country houses; in popular lectures; and even in domestic conversations that revolved around the latest books and periodicals. Science in the Marketplace reveals this other side of Victorian scientific life by placing the sciences in the wider cultural marketplace, ultimately showing that the creation of new sites and audiences was just as crucial to the growing public interest in science as were the scientists themselves. By focusing attention on the scientific audience, as opposed to the scientific community or self-styled popularizers, Science in the Marketplace ably links larger societal changes—in literacy, in industrial technologies, and in leisure—to the evolution of “popular science.”

Victorian Popularizers of Science

Victorian Popularizers of Science
Author: Bernard Lightman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 565
Release: 2009-10-15
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0226481174

The ideas of Charles Darwin and his fellow Victorian scientists have had an abiding effect on the modern world. But at the time The Origin of Species was published in 1859, the British public looked not to practicing scientists but to a growing group of professional writers and journalists to interpret the larger meaning of scientific theories in terms they could understand and in ways they could appreciate. Victorian Popularizers of Science focuses on this important group of men and women who wrote about science for a general audience in the second half of the nineteenth century. Bernard Lightman examines more than thirty of the most prolific, influential, and interesting popularizers of the day, investigating the dramatic lecturing techniques, vivid illustrations, and accessible literary styles they used to communicate with their audience. By focusing on a forgotten coterie of science writers, their publishers, and their public, Lightman offers new insights into the role of women in scientific inquiry, the market for scientific knowledge, tensions between religion and science, and the complexities of scientific authority in nineteenth-century Britain.