Darwin for beginners

I'm taking an Anthropology class this semester and found passages in the book that caught my attention:

1.

The point is, scientific curiosity is not a native human talent. It has to be shaped and directed by social situations; institutional arrangements and vested interests, which give certain inquiries their characteristic verve and momentum.

2.

In his great book "The Road to Xanadu" John Livingston Lowes discusses the origins of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. He shows how the facts and images Coleridge obtained from ceaseless reading eventually returned to be incorporated in one of the gratest poems of the English language. Lowes points out that this material would have been useless, unless it had been forgotten first. It had to be plunged into the transforming depths of Coleridge's unconscious imagination before it could be retrieved and reordered.

Two things to make you think...