There are a number of phenomenon regarding which the so-called consensus of scientists has determined the science to be settled and no longer subject to legitimate challenge. Such topics include not only anthropogenic global warming, but also the heritability of cognitive ability and related human characteristics, the adverse effects of various chemical compounds as well as evolution and similarly unprovable hypotheses in sociology and psychology.
Lysenkoism is really a better example of the current phenomenon than geocentricity because the former is rooted in incentives created by politics and is much more modern whereas the latter was rooted in religious dogma and was pre-Enlightenment (admittedly, the political challenges posed by the Reformation caused the Vatican to be hidebound about all sorts of dogma.) Lysenkoism is also a better example because it had catastrophic consequences for the Soviet Union whereas the Copernican view of the universe really had no immediate benefit to the well-being of humanity. An even more current example is government’s adoption of lipid hypothesis — cholesterol in diet increases blood cholesterol and heart attack incidence — in its dietary and agricultural policies, which has resulted in an epidemic of obesity and diabetes. Despite a woeful absence of solid empirical or theoretical justification for the lipid hypothesis, McGovern and CSPI insisted that decisions had to be made and could not wait. Once the decision was made, govt funding went to only scientists who favored the hypothesis and skeptics were shunned regardless of their bona fides.
It’s no coincidence that hypotheses that favor the expansion and other interests of government are often argued to be settled science whereas anomalies to well-established laws of science such as the speed of light being the universal speed limit, the laws of thermodynamics, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, even conservation of mass are seriously investigated by serious scientists without ridicule. Except for the weird behavior at the quantum level, such challenges have generally failed to be reproducible and therefore rejected, but even apparent anomalies are considered worthy of investigation.
In every age the most interesting and controversial topics are banned from discussion—whether by religion in earlier centuries or science today.
Let us just mention one topic (and then duck). How are men and women similar, and how are they different?
Any scientist who seriously studies this topic will be eating dog food within weeks of publishing any findings.