Funny how we only hear about this human foible - groupthink - when discussing the community of scientists, every one of which would love to be the one to turn their area of science on its head with a groundbreaking discovery. That's hardly the kind of lockstep conformity you imply exists in the scientific community. Iconoclasts will be challenged and maybe even ridiculed, but if they are right, they know it, and eventually, so will everybody else.
For comparison, look at the 'groupthink' of any religion. What happens when a pastor steps out of line? What happens if someone disagrees with the accepted orthodoxy? They are expelled and condemned.
Yes, which is what I alluding to with the opening words - accusing the scientific community of what is more true of other communities such as the religious community. We also saw this with the Liz Cheney matter. Step outside of groupthink and have your head metaphorically removed.
But not in science, as long as you are doing good science. If you're Michael Behe, you're not just outside of the mainstream in biology, you're not even doing science any more. You've left empiricism and basic, undirected exploration of nature for faith-based beliefs and goal-directed research in search of a god. Challenging an accepted tenet of science is altogether different from challenging the scientific method itself.
I think that those from a religious (or even business) background expect this is how it works in the scientific community. But it isn't.
This is a common theme - dealing with people who are unaware that there are other ways of thinking than by faith, projecting the values of their religious communities onto scientific ones, and projecting their faith-based thinking onto the rational evaluation of evidence. They seem to simply be unaware that other people have other ways of thinking that are radically different from theirs. Hence, every world view becomes a religion, every belief is believed by faith, atheists actually believe in gods (they can't imagine how it's possible not to) but hate them and are rebelling against them, atheists are guessing that there is no god just as the theist is guessing that there is one when the atheist repeatedly explains that he has not guessed either way and remains agnostic about gods. They don't seem to believe that that is possible since they rarely write anything that would make one believe that they know what the atheist actually believes and claims.
Courts used critical thinking to convict rapists. DNA proved that some who were convicted by courts could not possibly be guilty. So, the attempt to think critically doesn't always work.
Juries that say that an innocent person is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt are not thinking critically, are not thinking well. They should be aware that there is reasonable doubt if there is, and vote accordingly. When biases creep into the mix, that's faith-based thinking again - unjustified belief - ideas like "He looks guilty" or "He wouldn't be on trial if he didn't break some law."
Perhaps science is biased to reject things that don't fit with critical thinking?
Yes, it is.
But that is considered a rational bias, a constructive one. It was the replacing of faith-based thinking with reason and evidence-based thinking that turned creationism into biological evolution, alchemy into chemistry, and astrology into astronomy, in each case transforming a useless belief system into one that can be used to accurately predict some of the behavior of nature. That seems like pretty compelling evidence to me that wrong can be converted to right by removing unjustified belief and replacing it with empirically justified belief only.
Bias isn't always a bad thing. If rational, biases are useful things. They help us choose one course of action over another, and if they are sound, they will help us to do that effectively. Learning is the accumulation of biases, and if we learn well, only rational, justified biases.