Lynn Margulis argues that natural selection cannot provide a powerful enough evolutionary force to account for the punctuated equilibrium demonstrated in the fossil record. She proposes as an alternative that evolution is driven by changes in symbiotic relationships. I'm not a biologist, and I don't understand what exactly her theory means, so I'm not going to try to argue for or against it, but it got me thinking:
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. This would be effective because many people would not understand that "we do not understand everything about how evolution works" does not imply "creationism is correct". Thus, many evolutionary biologists might feel that they have to be very careful to look like they do know everything about how evolution works. This could make it more difficult for them to spot aspects in which their assumptions about evolution are mistaken. Maybe the biggest damage caused by creationism is that it suppresses legitimate criticism of the current accepted models of evolution, besides spreading false information to the general public.
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.
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.