Talk:Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Integrity

Early thread

This definitely needs some editing.--Filll 22:49, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Spam? Orangemarlin 20:44, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

If you look at the first version of this page, it was basically an advertisement for this organization which appears to be another arm of the Discovery Institute. I decided to study the vaunted claims of this organization and put them in their proper perspective. Basically it is a teeny tiny fraction of the fields represented, which really have nothing to do with evolution. This is just more nonsense from creationist luddites and hate-mongers and illiterate backwoods bible thumpers.--Filll 21:18, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

past activities

the paragraph is outdated. What about the fall 2007 activities? Did they take place? The sentences should be changed to the past tense, if they did, and should be deleted if there is no source confirming that they took place. Northfox (talk) 00:58, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Given that the PSSI hasn't written anything about the results of the events they had planned, except for the Jan 2008 Spanish ones, and as the only media coverage they have gained since 2006 appears to be a couple of comments by their CEO on the recent Florida science standards debate, we have no way of knowing if the other events took place. Hrafn^Talk_Stalk 02:26, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

My impression is that the organization has sort of fallen apart. It did not take off the way they expected it to. Then they started to charge substantial fees to belong. The DI has not really promoted it. The website has not been updated a lot. It was basically a bust. Oh well.--Filll (talk) 05:05, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Yeh, their plans seemed to be a bit too ambitious to carry out without some major external funding, and most probably the DI & others didn't want to spend too much on an organisation that wasn't generating major publicity. I'm suprisied that they managed to do the Spanish gig, to be perfectly honest. It'd be interesting to get a 3rd party account of exactly how substantive it was. Hrafn^Talk_Stalk 05:54, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

The Panda's Thumb has this write-up on their Spanish tour, based on articles in the Spanish version of Skeptic. Hrafn^Talk_Stalk 08:43, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

Broken Link

It appears that the link to footnote one is broken (article no longer exists). Without that citation, when it makes the statement that the organization is based on a logical fallacy (appeal to authority) it's nothing but the POV of the page's author. They may be very well trying to appeal to authority, but it needs a cite, otherwise it's POV. JimZDP (talk) 22:36, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

You are aware when references are given with other information like title, author, publisher etc that you can look them up and repair the links yourself right?--Filll (talk) 22:57, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes, and I'm also aware that uncited POV pushing can be completely removed. As I'm not the one pushing the POV, it seems I can do one of two things 1) research a position I didn't assert; or 2) delete the POV. I believe I'll opt for the latter. JimZDP (talk) 01:35, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

Additionally, I was able to download a copy of that paper, and it's main position is that ID is simply repackaged creationism. Howeve, not only does the author NOT state that the petition is an appeal to authority, she doesn't even mention the organization, let alone the petition. Plain and simple - nothing in that document stands for the proposition that the organization or position is an appeal to authority, and using it as a citation for that proposition is at best misleading, and borders on outright dishonesty. So I'm editing out that POV pushing. 75.49.225.27 (talk) 03:49, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

Bias

I think this article is obvisously full of author opinions. It seems at one point it was slanted toward creationism and now it's clearly slanted against this organization. See: "standard creationist strawman of evolution"; "standard creationist objections to evolution"; "a misleading nonsense phrase"; "mined quote". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.161.203.240 (talk) 15:49, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

It probably does need some cleanup and more references, I would agree.--Filll (talk | wpc) 16:12, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

This article doesn't even come close to NPOV. I made some massive edits to try to clean it up to make it closer to NPOV, but even with those edits, I think it need a ton of work. 69.235.146.181 (talk) 04:26, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

It appears that your favoured version, which removes a large amount of sourced material, is more a 'white wash' than NPOV. Hrafn^Talk_Stalk^(P) 05:18, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

I removed highly subjective and speculative language. How is that white wash? I think my edited version is DEFINITELY closer to NPOV than the trash that is published right now. Kenny (talk) 21:41, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

This article is very inaccurate: PSSI's only purpose is to point out inaccuracies in the Darwinian version of Macro Evolution, it does not propose any alternative theories and is not concerned with micro-evolution. PSSI is a secular organization with no ties to specific religions, it has members which are agnostic as well as of various religious backgrounds. PSSI is not a creationist organization and is not connected to Intelligent Design (although one of its members did become a fellow of the Discovery Institute after joining PSSI). Please correct or remove. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.250.127.250 (talk) 17:08, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

You have provided no WP:RS to support your claims. Also the central defining feature of Creationism is anti-evolutionism (and in fact the movement was known as anti-evolutionism for the early part of its existence), so you have failed to distinguish PSSI's views (even by assertion) from creationism. Hrafn^Talk_Stalk^(P) 18:48, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Non-profit status

Can anybody confirm that PSSI is a formal non-profit (or has any formal existence at all for that matter)? I checked both on the IRS website & GuideStar, but could find nothing. Hrafn^Talk_Stalk 14:56, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Ahh -- its formal name, that it is registered under, is "PSSI International Inc" -- I've added this information to the article.

The group's founder comments on this wikipedia article

Casey Luskin (a creationist) and the Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Integrity founder, Rich Akin, talk about alleged mistakes in this interview on Discovery Institute's podcast. BBiiis08 (talk) 02:25, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Given that the DI's definition of true or false seems to have far more to do with consonance with their message de jour than consonance with WP:V (or any other objective standard of accuracy), I think we can ignore their complaints. Hrafn^Talk_Stalk^(P) 03:18, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Curtailing the Bias

I cut out some obvious bias from the introduction and the first paragraph, but there's more left to be done. As an encyclopedic article, it should neutrally describe what this group asserts. If there are noteworthy refutations of this group's statements (not wiki-editorial or a single blog), they should be described apart and after this group's statements are neutrally described. No matter how wrong you, the writer, believes these assertions are incorrect, your opinion does not belong here. If you are passionate in your opposition, you can go look for noteworthy (and direct) refutations of this group, and describe them herein. The least the original author(s) could have done would have been to put a period in between this group's assertions and criticisms of those assertions. Higgyrun3 (talk) 06:25, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Assessment comment

The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Integrity/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.

This article is very biased. I think it's pretty clear from the author's comments: "standard creationist strawman of evolution", "This is incorrect" (no citation), "since natural selection is not a random process at all" (no citation), "a misleading nonsense phrase". Surely, if this group is as incorrect as the author claims, he can find some source to support him.

Last edited at 16:46, 3 May 2008 (UTC). Substituted at 02:55, 30 April 2016 (UTC)