Language is what you pick up naturally - everyone speaks, no problem - but science has to be learned methodically

My eager schoolteacher abandoned science to nature, assuming we would absorb the essentials through inquisitive play. Language, he used to say, was what made us different from the apes, and that was what he wanted to teach. But from my Mister Salgado I learned the reverse: language is what you pick up naturally - everyone speaks, no problem - but science has to be learned methodically, by study, if one is ever to emerge out of the swamp of our psychotic superstitions. It is what transforms our lives.

R. Gunesekera, Reef (1994), Kindle edn. loc 657