The difference between theory and fact is that in theory, theory and fact are the same but in fact, they’re often different. Hoyle never retracted. Duesberg hasn’t so far. Margulis was stubborn to the end. From their perspective, they weren’t wrong, so why should they ‘correct’ an error they didn’t perceive? That said, there are also many, many cases where people recognized their mistakes and issued retractions for their previous thoughts.
I predict the worst case scenario for IC. ICness was not pushed as a perfect delimiter between natural mechanisms and “whatever else”. That is, ‘simple’ IC systems probably could arise naturally. However, it was asserted that larger, more complicated IC systems couldn’t. And that’s the problem: A continuum that results in ambiguity about where the cut-off should be. One can always revise the cut-off in such as way as to leave some system untestable and thus leave the hypothesis ‘un-disproven’.