Sir

I was disturbed by your News Feature “Who has designs on your students' minds?” (Nature 434, 1062–1065; 2005), in which the proponents of ID are mostly portrayed as a persecuted minority. They are said to be afraid to reveal their identity and to be frequently censured into silence by anti-democratic scientists and administrators.

Your reporter clearly does not realize that ‘intelligent designers’ are not the only minority bullied into submission by the scientific establishment. The vast majority of flat-Earthers, tea-leaf readers, astrologers, geocentrists and phlogiston theorists cannot publish their studies in respectable journals. It is rumoured that Nature has rejected without review a study showing that storks bring babies into the world. I have even heard of a physician who was fired from a university hospital for trying to cure his patients by altering the ratio of blood to yellow bile and phlegm to black bile.

Thanks to your News Feature, I am now convinced that by replacing “small, medium and large” with “tall, grande and venti” — as in my local coffee-shop — the disreputable theory of biblical creationism can be turned into a respectable scientific discipline called ‘intelligent design’.