Richard Dawkins's IQ Score

Richard Dawkins has no published IQ score, and no reliable figure circulates. Any number you see would fail his own test: show me the data.

Kenya, Nyasaland, England · 1941–1959

A naturalist's childhood, annotated

Clinton Richard Dawkins was born in Nairobi on 26 March 1941. His father, John, was an agricultural civil servant in the British colonial service, called up to the army in Kenya during the war; the family moved on to Nyasaland (now Malawi).

Both parents were keen naturalists and answered his questions with scientific explanations rather than stories.

In 1949, when he was eight, the family returned to England and took over a farm the Dawkins family had owned in Oxfordshire since the 1700s. He was raised in the Church of England and says he accepted it until his mid-teens.

He dropped religious belief at around 16, after learning about Darwin and natural selection.

At school he preferred reading to games, and claimed to have been a slow starter at biology before a teacher at Oundle, Ioan Thomas, taught him to ask questions rather than memorise answers.

Oundle had a strong science tradition; Thomas later influenced his decision to study zoology.

Education, pinned and labelled

1954–59

Oundle School

Northamptonshire

An independent boarding school known for its workshops and science teaching.

1959–62

Balliol College, Oxford

BA, Zoology

Taught by the ethologist Niko Tinbergen, who later shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in medicine.

1962–66

University of Oxford

MA and DPhil

Doctoral research under Tinbergen on decision-making in animal behaviour, working with domestic chicks.

1967–69

University of California, Berkeley

Assistant professor

His first teaching post, during the height of the campus anti-war movement.

1970–2008

University of Oxford

Fellow of New College

Lecturer, then from 1995 the first Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science.

Breed your own biomorphs

In The Blind Watchmaker (1986) he wrote a program where simple “genes” draw branching creatures. Pick the offspring you like; it becomes the next parent. Small random mutations plus your selection build complex forms. A re-creation of the idea, not his original code.

GEN 1

PARENT

1 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 4

The complete bookshelf

Pull a book off the shelf.

1976

The Selfish Gene

Argued that natural selection is best understood from the gene's point of view, with bodies as “survival machines”. Also coined “meme” for units of cultural transmission.