Cascoly Books - Stephen Jay Gould

Structure of Evolutionary Theory

 In this book, Gould mentions that Darwin would not have succeeded in presenting his theory, even to brilliant men such as Hooke, Leibniz and Newton, since their minds were not yet prepared for the new kind of science.  Fiction like Quicksilver lets us attempt to imagine what that world might have been like.Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver has the Newtonian revolution as its backdrop, as The Royal Society emerges from alchemy.