on "provocative inquiry of uncritically-held assumptions"

Check out Winkler's reply to the responses to her article on theories about Shakespeare as a woman. I wonder if she (and others sympathetic with her view) would apply the same logic to the "consensus" on climate change and evolution as a comprehensive narrative (err...."explanation"?) for the development of life.

“Any worthwhile history is a constant state of self-questioning,” the author Hilary Mantel observed in her Reith Lectures for the BBC. It was in that spirit of skepticism that I undertook a provocative inquiry, exploring the possibility of...I questioned uncritically held assumptions instead of treating pronouncements by authorities as truth...In their often vitriolic zeal to condemn me for non­adherence to their position, some critics have misconstrued my careful formulations and denounced my endeavor as “conspiracism”...

The discourse around the question of Shakespeare authorship is plagued by this sort of anti-intellectual suppression of inquiry...the animating impulse of my essay was neither doctrinaire denial nor adamant certainty...The personal attacks and rhetorical dismissal that greet such questioning may be intended to stigmatize the questions, yet instead they reinforce their legitimacy.