Margulis is a highly respected biologist. She’s most well known for originally proposing the idea that mitochondria arose as part of symbiosis; this turned out to be completely correct. Since then she has spent most of her time trying to find subtle but powerful symbiosis where she can. Sometimes she has been correct and sometimes she hasn’t been.
Evolutionary biologists cannot afford to let Margulis’s theory become well-known and accepted as a mainstream theory, because that would create a rift in the pro-evolution camp, and creationists would be able to exploit this by combining Margulis’s argument that natural selection cannot account for punctuated equilibrium with arguments by Neo-Darwinists against Margulis’s theory to support their claim that evolution is false.
There’s a lot wrong with this. First of all, biologists have spent a lot of time over the last 40 years arguing over whether natural selection accounts for most diversity we see. Even Darwin’s original ideas had a notion of sexual selection. But modern ideas include neutral drift and the founder effect, as well as horizontal gene transfer via infection, and a few other ideas. So the claim that biologists can’t discuss such ideas seems wrong given that empirically they are doing so.
The vast majority of biologists don’t pay much attention to creationism and aren’t spending their time thinking about how creationists will use their results. Moreover, creationism is a generally a US phenomenon (although certainly not completely). If one is a biologist in almost any Western European country these issues will not cross one’s mind.
Again, I’m not arguing in favor of Margulis’s theory in particular, but the statement “There exists at least one false fact about evolutionary biology that is accepted as true by a consensus of researchers in that field” seems fairly likely to be true
Of course that’s the case. But that has nothing to do with reacting to creationism. That follows for almost any broad area of science simply due to the large number of facts involved.
Margulis is a highly respected biologist. She’s most well known for originally proposing the idea that mitochondria arose as part of symbiosis; this turned out to be completely correct. Since then she has spent most of her time trying to find subtle but powerful symbiosis where she can. Sometimes she has been correct and sometimes she hasn’t been.
There’s a lot wrong with this. First of all, biologists have spent a lot of time over the last 40 years arguing over whether natural selection accounts for most diversity we see. Even Darwin’s original ideas had a notion of sexual selection. But modern ideas include neutral drift and the founder effect, as well as horizontal gene transfer via infection, and a few other ideas. So the claim that biologists can’t discuss such ideas seems wrong given that empirically they are doing so.
The vast majority of biologists don’t pay much attention to creationism and aren’t spending their time thinking about how creationists will use their results. Moreover, creationism is a generally a US phenomenon (although certainly not completely). If one is a biologist in almost any Western European country these issues will not cross one’s mind.
Of course that’s the case. But that has nothing to do with reacting to creationism. That follows for almost any broad area of science simply due to the large number of facts involved.