It’s annoying when someone is right on and you considered her merely clever.

The irritation was unavoidable upon reading Richard Cohen’s recent column for The Washington Post criticizing Rick Perry’s “reality gap.” According to the liberal pundit, Gov. Perry “waxed wrongly” on global warming for saying a “substantial number of scientists” manipulated data on temperature and that “an increasing number of scientists have challenged this notion” of increasing human-generated warming.

Cohen, who usually is one of the less ad hominem Post scribblers, immediately equated Perry to Sen. Joe McCarthy and George W. Bush as parallel ideological pioneers of the “political use of the concocted statistic.” Like McCarthy with communists, Perry was said to find climate skeptics “everywhere” when merely two percent of climate scientists actually were unconvinced of warming. While conceding Perry and Bush do not even get along, they do have “similarities on their views on climate,” he said– and one could see this coming – and about evolution too. Perry had earlier claimed “there are gaps” in the theory of evolution and Cohen cutely retorted if there are “he is one.”

Hate to admit it but Ann Coulter hit it on the head. In the “church of liberalism” there must be no gaps in holy writ. She did slip a bit saying evolution was the “only subject that is discussed exclusively as a ‘Do you believe?’ question with yes-or-no answers” – rather than realizing the world is a complex place – forgetting for the moment about its other dogma of global warming. Both subjects require “the flash mob method of scientific inquiry,” she continued, which means “Liberals quickly surround and humiliate anyone who disagrees with them. They are baffled when appeals to status (which would work on them) don’t work on everyone else.” Sadly, this describes the Cohen column to a tee. The scribe could not say that Perry was simply erroneous: “It’s not his thinking I fear. It’s the lack of any at all.”

The poor dears really do not understand science as opposed to flesh and blood scientists who express their opinions. Scientific conclusions must be made within the assumptions of a particular scientific discipline, its methodology and its means of measurement. Charles Darwin himself would not understand modern biology and would absolutely reject widely-accepted additions to “survival of the fittest” such as massive meteor strikes from outer space disrupting the earth’s evolutionary process and the Big Bang. In fact, no scientist believes in simple survival of the fittest evolutionism any more. There are gaps everywhere except for those still in thrall to their outdated high school biology textbooks. Cohen must have been enough of a good student to take it all in as dogma as a youth, without deviating from it ever since.

As philosopher of science Karl Popper (a non-theist by the way) demonstrated long ago, Darwinian evolution was a theoretical assumption not a conclusion from empirical demonstration. That does not mean it is wrong but it is not written on sacred tablets either. As far as more subtle versions of evolution that do not try to explain everything based upon one unchangeable thesis, even the Catholic Church gives evolution a role in shaping life and nature. Because of nature’s complexity, the really, really true-believers (such as in co-discoverer of DNA Francis Crick’s book Life Itself) must invent some other explanation for the gaps. Highly intelligent extraterrestrials must have sent the first living cells to Earth in an unmanned spaceship to start the process, Crick speculated, so interested was he in explaining the complexity of nature’s code without another first source such as a Creator. How the spacemen evolved he did not say.

The Cohen naïveté is almost endearing. He correctly notes that most “climate scientists” believe in “global warming” – although they do not quite bill themselves as such any longer, now using the more amorphous term “climate change” (of course, climate changes). He does not seem to realize that a climate scientist is someone who believes in warming as the foundation of his “science.” There is another scientific field called meteorology and a survey of these involved in weather forecasting by investigators at George Mason University found that a majority did not believe in unidirectional global warming, since global temperatures have fluctuated up and down through the ages and actually have stopped increasing for the past decade. Only one-third believed any temperature increase was manmade to any significant degree. Both of these disciplines have a claim to the title “science” and either might be correct. But not to liberals, for one is like a religion and the other discipline is simply ignored.

The scientifically naïve would be shocked to know there has been a Wall Street Journal investigatory study by the firm Thompson Reuters titled “Mistakes in Scientific Studies Surge.” To give him credit, Cohen at least did not directly defend the doings at the University of East Anglia U.N. research center in forecasting future warming as have other climate zealots, insisting the researchers were vindicated. In fact, they were not, except of purposeful fraud. The major international and British investigatory panels both found “irregularities” and the refusal or inability to provide data to replicate results. The scientific clergy makes mistakes. The Journal study found that published retractions admitting serious error in major scientific journals has increased fifteen fold since 2004, while retractions for outright fraud increased by double that rate.

These scientists are not gods but entrepreneurs out to make and preserve reputations. As the editor of the most prestigious British journal, Richard Horton, put it “The stakes are so high. A single paper in Lancet and you get a chair and you get your money. It’s your passport to success.” Of the ten major scientific areas studied, the greatest number of retractions in the top scientific journals between 2001-05 and 2006-10 were in Medicine (from 87 in the earlier four-year period to 436 in the latter), in Biology (from 69 to 277) and in Chemistry (from 5 to 147). These are precisely the “harder” sciences and those most used to confirm Church of Liberalism dogma. The time taken to issue retractions has jumped from five months in 2000 to 31 months in 2009 and the retractions typically receive less emphasis than the original findings.

Delay and over-reliance on scientific mystique can have disastrous effects. In 2003 The Lancet published a study demonstrating that ACE inhibitors and ARB drugs used together as blood pressure reducers dramatically increased success as opposed to either alone. Almost immediately the study reached number two on Lancet’s all-time most-cited papers list. In 2006 several investigators first questioned Lancet but it took until 2009 to issue a retraction for what turned out to have been a totally fabricated study, which affected the health of the 140,000 patients using the combination and an additional 36,000 enrolled in follow-up studies. According to a presidential commission, in the 1940s U.S. Public Health Service scientists experimented on 5,500 prisoners, mental patients and children to test theories about sexually transmitted diseases, 1,300 of whom were directly exposed to the diseases and 83 died.

Science is complex stuff, DNA for example. DNA is now as widely used as fingerprinting to convict suspects of murder. Prosecutors use expert witnesses who claim 99.99% probability that the genetic markers found at a crime scene match those of the suspect. Yet, as Northwestern University law professor Jay Koehler explains, “Unfortunately, and surprisingly to most people, the DNA test cannot identify the probability” of a positive match. DNA is too complex to match it all so samples are used. And, as Koehler concluded, “The risk of human error far exceeds the risk of error due to coincidental match.” Beyond the measurement error and inherent complexity, a proper test then extrapolates from a sample match to a probability of a positive identification by incorporating a Bayesian prior probability of the suspect being the person sought irrespective of the DNA evidence. These prior and coordinated estimates must be inherently subjective and can override the empirical data. One study found dozens of partial matches of unrelated people in a data base of 65,000 Arizona felons.

A progressivism that believes scientific experts can rule authoritatively on all matters of health, education, welfare and environment so that government experts can then use their conclusions to create a utopian Great Society always will be tempted to give a mystical meaning to scientific conclusions. Even so, is it too much to ask for civility from the left when someone questions scientific conjectures that lie at the heart of their secular religion, as traditionalists must practice every day?

Donald Devine was the director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management from 1981 to 1985 under Ronald Reagan and is the editor of ConservativeBattleline Online.