Creationist question on GCSE Biology exam

[bsodmike]

Take weight and mass for instance. Both are commonly interchanged in everyday language - and fair enough. Generally people don't need to know the difference and only need to know "oh it weighs 10kg" even though that's technically incorrect. However, as soon as you step into the realm of physics, it is grossly inaccurate to label weight and mass as the same thing. 10kg is a mass, 98N is the corresponding weight (in a grav. field of strength g). If you made this kind of gaffe in a physics paper it would cause uproar.

In my spare time I tutor kids in GCSE Physics, Mathematics and Chemistry. I recall highlighting the above fact and had a bit of 'deja-vu' reading your response. My sentiments match those of Whiternoise, and feel such questions are far too ambiguous for a science paper.

[Lucio]

Funnily enough, my GCSE Biology teacher was heavily into religion, yet he didn't have a problem at all with teaching his subject matter. In his view the fact that biology was so amazingly complicated, and required things like the theory of evolution to explain it happily pointed towards God.

That aside, I'm kinda surprised that those questions got onto the paper, they're really poorly written regardless of what you think about the religious viewpoints. I personally have little issue with teaching the concept of Intelligent Design in biology as an alternative to evolution, because it teaches some really good points regarding the scientific method and the dangers of using a model.

Also, one last point, the genius thing about Intelligent Design, it's totally unprovable because it's justification is the same as it's hypothesis.