Little kids as scientists, scientists as little kids

My wife likes to point out that our nearly-2-year-old son is the ultimate scientist...something that could be said of all young children. Starting with nothing but boundless curiosity and awe, they are able, with time, to figure out what this world around them is and how it works. You can see it in their eyes as they soak up every bit of information around them.

So you can see why the following made me both nod and chuckle:

"Over the past ten years, developmental psychologists have increasingly used the model of scientific theory change to characterize cognitive development. I have called this idea the "theory theory. It has been consistently productive in explaining the child's developing understanding of the mind and the world. ... The analogy to science has two aspects. First, children's knowledge is structured in a theory-like way, and second, that knowledge changes in a way that is analogous to theory change in science.

"This theory formation system may have evolved specifically to allow human children to learn. Human beings' evolutionary advantage stems from our ability to adapt our behavior to a very wide variety of environments. In turn, this depends on our ability to learn swiftly and efficiently about the particular physical and social environment we grow up in. Their long, protected immaturity gives human children an opportunity to infer the particular structure of the world around them. The powerful and flexible theory formation abilities we see in childhood may have evolved to make this learning possible. In this view, science takes advantage of these basic abilities in a more socially organized way and applies them to new types of problems and domains. Science is thus a kind of epiphenomenon of cognitive development. It is not that children are little scientists but that scientists are big children."

As you might imagine, I added the emphasizing bold and italics. It makes me wonder if Shakespeare had it wrong, that "second childishness" doesn't mark the seventh age of man, but the beginnings of graduate school.

[Many thanks to my ever-vigilant father-in-law for sending this in, via National Review Online. For the whole article, go down to your local library and look up: A. Gopnik (2000). Explanation as orgasm and the drive for causal understanding: The evolution, function and phenomenology of the theory-formation system. In F. Keil & R. Wilson (Eds.) Cognition and explanation. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.]