One &#x27;scientific villain&#x27; that occurs to me: Ronald Fisher. He used his considerable influence in the statistics community to suppress Bayesian inference research because he disagreed with the premise of prior probability. Set Bayesian research back decades. He was a strong proponent of the p-value causing some of the reproducibility crisis in scientific publications.<p>See: &quot;The theory that would not die&quot; by Sharon Bertsch for a very entertaining read of the entire conflict.<p>Full disclosure: I&#x27;ve published papers in Bayesian statistics.