Deniers Bad; Herd Followers Good???

The recent dustup surrounding the SMU design conference highlighted a rhetorical tactic that has become fashionable in the anti-ID herd.  This tactic is to smear IDists with the “denier” tag, as if mere denial is self-evidently bad.  Herewith, a reflection on famous deniers in history from another forum in which I participate (used with permission):

I think that there may be some fodder in the current “witch hunt” attitude towards “deniers” for us to use. Consider the following example:
 
There were a couple of doctors who were “stress deniers” in that they denied that stress caused peptic ulcers. They had the audacity to suggest that ulcers were caused by a bacterial infection. As a result, they were marginalized and scoffed at and (so I understand) heckled and laughed at during presentations. The end result: they won the 2005 Nobel Price in medicine for the bacterium Helicobacter pylori and its role in gastritis and peptic ulcer disease. The take home message that we should shout at every opportunity: today’s “deniers” are tomorrows heros.
 
Consider also the following:
 
Copernicus – geocentrism denier
 
Pasteur – spontaneous generation denier
 
Darwin – inheritance of acquired traits denier
 
Einstein - absolute reference frame denier
 
Gould and Margulis – Darwinian gradualism deniers
 
Hawking – Steady State Model denier
 
Conway Morris – purely random evolution denier
 
Woese – universal common descent denier
 
etc.

Based on this, being a “denier” is a grand tradition in science, a tradition that science literally cannot do without. Without the bold “deniers” challenging the status quo, there would be no progress in science.

My colleague invites me (and I invite readers) to add to the list.