Devil's Advocate wrote:What we're looking for here, to have a valid comparison to YECism, is a scientist (or small group of them) who held to an old theory while their peers endorsed a new one.
And of course we want this example to turn out to have the old theory eventually found to be right.
And to further increase the similarity to YECism, let's have the new theory supported by all the evidence, and the old theory by none of it.
So this is where you've been hanging out these past two years. Nice to see you're still fighting the fight for rationality and empiricism.Four centuries ago, practitioners of science risked torture and death for challenging and refuting religious notions.
One crucial difference in science is that science is self correcting, and will embrace new ideas, despite their initial novelty, once the evidence accumulates. Two good examples of this would be the Big Bang Theory and plate tectonics. Those who opposed the theories eventually must admit that they were mistaken.
Literalist religious views of the natural world are unchanging, because it is the goal of their adherents to preserve the orthodoxy for all time regardless of new data.
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I am glad that the H5N1 virus hasn't jumped the species barrier. But to characterize the concerns of the WHO and others regarding the risk of this event as a "hoax" is foolish in the extreme. Sensationalist reports and bad made-for-TV movies are a distraction from the reality that this viral family is known to jump species.
Three years ago, my home city of Toronto experienced an outbreak of SARS because a handful of people staying in the same hotel in Hong Kong were infected and got on a plane. With modern air travel, a mutated H5N1 would spread just as quickly as SARS, but would be considerably more deadly.
We aren't out of the woods until the virus is eradicated as a potential source of human illness.
Here, and a couple of 
