Letter: Why flowers?

Sir: Richard Dawkins (Saturday Profile, 17 October) may be a brilliant university teacher but he is a lousy teacher of six-year-olds.

When in response to his question, his daughter says that a field of flowers is there "to make the world pretty and to help the bees make honey for us", he fails to recognise his daughter's appreciation of beauty, her empathy with insects, her implicit recognition that earth, plants and flowers and humans are interdependent. Instead, he tells her she is wrong and feeds her a concept about genetics well beyond the grasp of any six- year-old.

ANN HOPKINS

Cardiff