Challenges to any strictly "scientific idea" as you are thinking of them are not going to come in this form of article. They will come in the form of scholarly papers and studies published in major journals. They won't be prompted by these sort of fluff questions for celebrity scientists, they will naturally arise through research.
Dawkin's answer was not off; your expectations for what this question was asking and how it could be answered were off.
What would you suggest as a scientific idea ready for retirement?
1. All biological life depends on sunlight. Falsified first by bacterial colonies that thrive near deep-sea volcanic vents.
2. Light requires an ether for its transmission. Falsified by the classic Michelson-Morley experiment.
3. The universe is static in overall size, "... which required Professor Einstein to add a cosmological constant to his intellectual masterpiece to make it agree with observation." Falsified soon after by observations that led to the Big Bang theory.
4. Phlogiston, the idea that burning matter relied on a hypothetical essence responsible for the combustion.
5. Universal and constant space and time, an idea favored by Isaac Newton, falsified by relativity.
6. Inheritance of acquired traits, falsified by modern genetics (but to some extent argued with by the new field of epigenetics).
Just a few that come to mind.
The scientific community works within paradigms which adequately explain their experiments. There may be some weird results, but as long as they remain few, new scientists will remain convinced of the paradigm's merits. The areas of weird results are the most interesting, and attract attention and further exploration.
When the weird results multiply after further investigation, ad hoc modifications to the theories of the paradigm might be necessary. This might work for a while, satisfying the scientists' need to explain their results.
However, ad hoc changes may push the paradigm to its limits. Crisis occurs within the scientific community. Scientists may start to abandon core tenets of the paradigm in search for new theories which are better at explaining all the weird results. The paradigm might be so ingrained into the world-view of its scientists that only young scientists who are yet to be indoctrinated might be able to see past it.
The famous examples are of relativity, quantum physics, and heliocentrism. Ptolemaic geocentrism, particularly, had a lot of ad hoc modifications to explain the loopy movement of planets.
In this sense, scientific ideas are certainly retired. More can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superseded_scientific_theories
If someone understands Kuhn and philosophy of science better than me, please correct me. I know that Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend have different views on "scientific progress", but Thomas Kuhn is the only one I have read on this topic.
* "Evidence-Based Medicine"
* "Large Randomized Controlled Trials"
* "Things Are Either True Or False"
* "Psychogenic Illness"
* "Replication As a Safety Net"
* "Reproducibility"
* "Falsifiability"
* "The Power of Statistics"
* "Certainty. Absolute Truth. Exactitude."
* "The Rational Individual"
* "IQ"
* "Mind Versus Matter"
* "Infinity"
* "Statistical Significance"
* "Artificial Intelligence"
* "Theories of Anything"
* "Computer Science"
* "Simplicity"
* "Scientific Morality"
( details : http://edge.org/responses/what-scientific-idea-is-ready-for-... )
Having said that, I'm not sure how you could "retire" this concept since we, as humans, rely on abstractions for everything (language, math, morals, etc). I feel his point is just that scientists should keep this in mind, as a check against the ego which is what leads to dogmatic thinking.
Edit: Thinking more about it I think that Dawkins' answer was a good one, but it seems like he in a way misunderstands its meaning. He uses it to showcase how it can be used to 'mislead' people into disbelieving things like evolution, but he doesn't seem to recognize that if you were to completely remove the concept of essentialism you would essentially have to accept that science can never describe everything and at some point one just has to accept things as they are without meaning. This implies, then, that science is just one 'perspective' for giving meaning to something that is essentially meaningless. This to me would also mean that science and religion are not opposing forces but simply different ways at looking at the same thing.
That may be true, but all of them are subject to falsification by new evidence, and none of them move beyond challenge -- none of them become true in a final sense -- only false.
He deals so fluently in generalities that he starts sounding like a new-age prophet predicting the next earthquake that will blight humanity.
http://edge.org/responses/what-scientific-idea-is-ready-for-...
This is nonsense. Dawkins' topic wasn't scientific ideas ready for retirement, so it's not surprising that the issue didn't come up. Also, those who understand science realize there are no accepted ideas, ideas beyond challenge, ideas that have become truths. Scientific theories can never be proven true, only false -- this is one of the most basic scientific principles. I'm sure Dawkins fully understands this, but it happens it wasn't the topic of this article.
Sounds like you have pretty strong feelings about this.