>>>>When one thinks of the kudos, wealth, and everlasting fame that would accrue to anyone who broke ranks and produced evidence that ToE is wrong (and note that even people like Behe, Denton, and Dembski accept common descent and the great age of the earth) and the zero benefit of keeping quiet than you have to be particularly paranoid believer in giant conspiracies to think that somehow scientists are all engaged in some pointless con-game to perpetuate a falsehood aimed at discrediting a particular branch of Christianity, to no benefit to those in the conspiracy.<<<
I thought it was the other way around. I thought any scientist who strayed from the Evolution Plantation would be ostracized and marginalized by the elite?
You are laughably misinformed about how science works. New ideas that have evidence to back them are avidly seized upon. Everyone wants to be the amongst the first into new fields, with all the opportunities for new discoveries that exist in a ground-breaking area. What creationists never explain is what motive individual scientists would have for taking part in an insane worldwide century-long conspiracy to attack fundamentalist Christianity and Islam, when to break ranks carries such huge rewards if your beliefs are true. The problem with creationism/ID isn't that it is new, it is that it is a ten-thousand year old idea that has produced no results to-date. 150 years of evolutionary-biology OTOH has produced numerous stunning predictions, and been vindicated in numerous ways that Darwin couldn't have imagined, as our scientific techniques deepen and widen. I remember when the creationists predicted that the molecular genomic data would falsify evolution. Well, they were sure wrong about that, instead the genomic data has provided yet another vindication of evolution; all the predictions made by ToE about how the genomes would stack up have been met. Copying errors, viral insertions, and neutral mutations are preserved in the same tree of life as is indicated by morphology and other cladistic techniques.