The article attempts to prove that Darwinism in popular culture plays a role of a theory of everything. Bestselling authors of popular science such as Edward O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins and Bill Bryson have acquainted general public with the theory of evolution, and its newest facet — the Modern Synthesis. Darwinian paradigms, as defined by Thomas Kuhn, are also used in popular books on cosmology, sociobiology, psychology, and religious studies. Moreover, the Darwinian grand narrative of evolutional history shapes the way in which contemporary mass culture presents the history of our planet in numerous educational TV series. Last but not least, Charles Darwin himself has recently become a popular icon and the story of his life is remade in a growing number of fiction and non-fiction books and movies.

The new edition in Italian of the articles by the Polish microbiologist and philosopher Ludwik Fleck (1896–1961) edited by Francesco Coniglione offers the opportunity for some considerations around this significant scholar. Fleck anticipates Kuhn’s ideas as well as those of the sociology of science. For him, any epistemology that does not take psychological and sociological methods into account, or that does not concern itself with economics, technology, art, and even politics, is an epistemology imaginabilis. Here we discuss some key points of the essays collected in the book, some observations taken from the rich introduction of the editor, and an inevitable question: Why has Fleck been neglected for so long?