Science is both conservative and progressive
It occurred to me that natural science has by necessity a curious philosophical position, in that it uses some elements of both conservative and progressive philosophies.

The conservative philosophy mandates evidence-based judgement without ideology: we should do what has been seen to have worked before, not what we believe is plausibly correct but have never tried or never achieved success. The philosophical position of science is the same: evidence is king. Many times, a researcher would discover something that went directly against their desires, intuitions, expectations, or prior philosophical beliefs. Many times, something that was plausibly correct turned out to be wrong. Science accepts these facts as genuine advances.

As a direct consequence, another tenet of conservative philosophy is shared by science: a procedure or policy is to be adopted if it demonstrably brings good results, not merely when our intentions and hoped-for results are good.

On the other hand, a typical assumption of progressive social philosophy is that things will get better if we "solve" one problem after another, and problems are solved by manipulating the society according to "social theory". Most natural science has been operating under the same assumption: that a solution needs to be found and can be found for every problem. It is assumed that researchers can discover root causes of events and influence those events by direct manipulation.

It is true that in certain areas of science, some problems were proved to be definitely unsolvable. However, the majority of scientific research operates under the working assumption that all problems are solvable. Science has generally shied away from studying very complex systems whose behavior is essentially unpredictable and cannot be manipulated with the same reliability as, say, a washing machine.

In the cases where science does study such systems (e.g. biological systems), a statistical and phenomenological approach is adopted: we merely record statistical correlations between our manipulations and results. In this way, science pretends to remain within the framework of finding "solutions", even though there are no real laws being discovered that would be actual comprehensive descriptions of any root causes. Because of this, science is in a philosophical quandary when it tries to study very complex systems: it cannot admit the failure of the traditional "solution-oriented" method, and yet it needs to produce some results, which are then necessarily quite tenuous. However, in order not to lose all credibility, science now finds itself compelled to present the statistical "results" with as much certainty as old-style physical laws such as Newton's law. ("A scientific study has shown that...")

As an example, compare traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) versus modern (or "scientific") Western medicine. The complex system under study is the health of the human body. Western medicine has discovered a large number of chemical manipulations that statistically produce specific desirable changes in "most" patients. Traditional Chinese medicine proposes a large number of remedies and lifestyle changes intended to improve the patient's condition holistically and to generally maintain health (rather than to "solve" any specific health problem). In this aspect, traditional Chinese medicine is philosophically "conservative" while science is philosophically "progressive".

Science has examined the traditional Chinese medicine and found that there is no statistically significant outcome when traditional Chinese remedies are tested against particular ailments in particular patients. So, medical science rejects TCM. Science refuses to admit that an approach is valid unless there is a demonstrated statistical correlation. However, human health is far more complex than scientific theories known so far, and there is no hope of discovering a holistic "formula" for attaining and maintaining health.