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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As a science teacher, I can tell you emphatically that children are actually natural scientists. They're just incredibly bad at all those many skills, like measuring things accurately, or evaluating their results rationally, that make science useful and valid.
By that measure, everyone is a natural you-name-it, once you teach them how to do it, how to think about it, how to integrate it into their worldview, etc. etc. I'm not saying children can't be scientists. But they aren't scientists. Or plumbers, for that matter.
