Somebody will always defy dogma at some point. It's irrelevant in that for good or ill, it will happen.
Up until whatever group is in power decides to kill whoever has made that defiance and burns their papers. You use the term "new" knowledge-
But how do you know it's "new"? We're living at the still-fragile emergence from a several-thousand-year informational dark age, where entire town-size libraries were burned to the ground and people thought showering was passe. Who knows what our current existence is built on top of, given all that was lost?
Throughout western civilization there was a tendency towards the belief that, through science and rationalism, mankind had transcended nature. The sinking of an "unsinkable ship" and the loss of thousands of lives laid bare the flaws in that thinking.
Or maybe it was the rushed production, the incompetence of the ship's crew, the substandard steel, the ignoring of updated safety signal protocols and the improper ratio of lifeboats-to-passengers?
Man "transcends" nature every single day, otherwise we'd all be naked cave people sitting around in a field getting eaten by whatever happens to come across us. We are human by our very transcendence of nature, by the idea that we are not limited to "what God gave us". If God put us here, he put us here naked and stickless. It was us, not he, who sharpened that stick and became the creator of invention.