A reader makes an excellent point which applies to the sciences generally — they are cumulative disciplines, much like conservatism:

Jonah,
There is an immediate refutation of Julian Sanchez’s theory is that liberals approach problems through an “engineering” mindset and that is that the majority of engineers are in fact very conservative in their views, both political and technical. Engineers don’t approach each problem as a new, never-before encoutered problem as liberals seem to do. Instead, each new problem is viewed as a variation of a problem a previous engineer has surely encountered somewhere, so the problem is reduced to researching previous sucessful answers to homologous problems and adapting them to the new situation.
Can you imagine if the Boeing engineers designed the next generation of jetliners the way liberals would design our next health-care system?