Letter: Cloning: the `experts' must learn to listen

Sir: I always enjoy reading Professor Dawkins's articles, mainly to find the pH of his current invective - recently about 2.1 on my Universal Indicator.

Could I remind the learned Professor of the Public Understanding of Science what a much greater scientist wrote in 1615: "I think that in discussions of physical problems we ought to begin not from the authority of scriptural passages, but from sense-experiences and necessary demonstrations: for the holy Bible and the phenomena of nature proceed alike from the divine Word, the former as the dictate of the Holy Ghost and the latter as the observant executrix of God's commands."

Was Galileo such a cloth-head?

Dr H W JONES

Nantwich, Cheshire