Science of Play

I like to define play as the way I see Baby J exploring things she find in her meanderings. If she encounters a toy that interests her, she'll run a series of experiments on it and evaluate the results. She'll mouth it, yell at it, turn it over in her hand, throw it, and then move on to something else. And she does this with pretty much everything. It seems to me that Baby J is in a constant state of low tech scientific exploration.

I'm pretty sure all kids do this. Play is universal after all and kids have been doing it for as long as there have been kids. What I find so interesting is that kids get into these scientific micro-explorations all by themselves. No one has to teach them how to do it.

Could it be that science is a primary human faculty? Coming before language acquisition, before numerical reasoning. Could you make the case that all of our understanding is based on these little experiments we run as children?