The silliest thing about the "children are natural scientists" line (which is common amongst scientists for whatever reason) is it actually underemphasizes how hard it is to be a scientist, and how many millennia it took before we really had "science" in the modern sense.
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Being a scientist (true or not) isn't specific knowledge or a criterion. It is patterns of thought, experience, worldviews, tacit knowledge. It is about being indoctrinated into the practices and habits of a discipline. Same as for non-scientific disciplines, like mine: history.
The exact practices and habits of thought vary dramatically across the spectrum of what is called science (or expertise more broadly). The work to become a paleontologist has little in common with that of a theoretical physicist, as just an example.
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There is great work that has been done in the history, anthropology, and sociology of science on what exactly these practices are, how they are taught, and how students at different levels of education are disciplined into becoming professional scientists.
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But the general point is, there's a reason it tends to take around 10 years of education for someone to be able to really contribute novel, reliable knowledge (in ANY field). Because it's not at all a basic part of human nature to do that — it's a product of education.
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I think that people who have been experts for so long (in whatever field) tend to forget how much work was involved in all of those years, and tend to see their way of seeing the world as more "normal" and "natural" than it really is. But it's the product of a long process.
End of conversation
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