What Is Richard Dawkins' Net Worth?
Richard Dawkins is an English ethologist, writer, and evolutionary biologist who has a net worth of $10 million. Contrary to what you may read on various websites, Richard Dawkins is NOT worth $130 million or even $110 million. This false information stems from rumors that in 2012 The Sunday Times Rich List pegged Richard's net worth at $110 million. As far as we can tell, Dawkins has never been on any of The Sunday Times Rich Lists, and his net worth is not more than $10 million.
Richard was born in Nairobi, Kenya, in March 1941. From 1995 to 2008, he served as the University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understand of Science. Dawkins is now an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford. His 1976 book "The Selfish Gene" helped to popularize the gene centered view of evolution and also first introduced the term meme. Richard introduced the concept that phenotypic effects of a gene are not limited to an organism's body and can stretch into the environment, which includes the bodies of other organisms. He presented this concept in his 1982 book "The Extended Phenotype." He is an atheist and a patron of the British Humanist Association. Dawkins has criticized creationism and intelligent design, and he argued against the watchmaker analogy in his 1986 book "The Blind Watchmaker." He has sold over three million copies of his 2006 book "The God Delusion," in which he "asserts the irrationality of belief in God and the grievous harm religion has inflicted on society." Richard founded the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science in 2006. He has also been featured in several documentary films.
Early Life
Richard Dawkins was born Clinton Richard Dawkins on March 26, 1941, in Nairobi, British Kenya. He is the son of Clinton John Dawkins and Jean Mary Vyvyan, and he has a younger sister named Sarah. His father worked for the British Colonial Service as an agricultural civil servant, and during World War II, he was commissioned into the King's African Rifles. He returned to England in the late 1940s, and he farmed commercially on an Oxfordshire estate he had inherited. Richard followed Christianity until his teenage years, and he told The Guardian in 2003, "I suppose that by that time the main residual reason why I was religious was from being so impressed with the complexity of life and feeling that it had to have a designer, and I think it was when I realised that Darwinism was a far superior explanation that pulled the rug out from under the argument of design. And that left me with nothing." Dawkins attended Wiltshire's Chafyn Grove School and Northamptonshire's Oundle School before studying zoology at Balliol College, Oxford. He graduated from Balliol with a second-class degree, then he earned a Doctor of Philosophy there and was a research student under ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen.
Career
From 1967 to 1969, Dawkins served as an assistant professor of zoology in the U.S., at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1970, he was a lecturer at the University of Oxford, and in 1995, he became the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science there. Richard has written numerous books, including "The Selfish Gene" (1976), "The Extended Phenotype" (1982), "The Blind Watchmaker" (1986), "River Out of Eden" (1995), "A Devil's Chaplain" (2003), "The God Delusion" (2006), "The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution" (2009), "An Appetite for Wonder" (2013), "Science in the Soul" (2017), "Outgrowing God" (2019), "Flights of Fancy: Defying Gravity by Design and Evolution" (2021), and "The Genetic Book of the Dead" (2024). He has made the documentaries "Nice Guys Finish First" (1986), "The Blind Watchmaker" (1987), "Break the Science Barrier" (1996), "The Root of All Evil?" (2006), "The Enemies of Reason" (2007), "The Genius of Charles Darwin" (2008), "Faith School Menace?" (2010), and "Sex, Death and the Meaning of Life" (2012).
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Personal Life
Richard has been married four times and divorced three times. He was married to ethologist Marian Stamp from 1967 to 1984. Later that year, Dawkins wed Eve Barham, and they welcomed a daughter before divorcing. Richard's third wife was actress Lalla Ward, who he was married to from 1992 to 2016. He has been married to illustrator Jana Lenzová since 2021. In February 2016, Dawkins suffered a mild stroke. A few months later, he reported that his recovery was going well, writing on his website, "I can now type with both hands, fast but still inaccurately. Still get tired, still can't sing (not a great hardship), still speak croakily. My balance is improving with physio exercises such as impersonating a stork standing on one leg. And I can ride my bike, albeit a little unsteadily on tight corners."
Awards and Honors
Dawkins has received honorary doctorates in science from several universities, including Durham University, the University of Westminster, the University of Oslo, and the University of Antwerp. He received honorary doctorates of letters from the Australian National University and the University of St Andrews, and he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (1997) and a Fellow of the Royal Society (2001). Richard is a patron of The Gorilla Organization and the Oxford University Scientific Society. In 1987, "The Blind Watchmaker" earned him a Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a Royal Society of Literature award. Dawkins has received the Zoological Society of London's Silver Medal (1989), the Michael Faraday Award (1990), the Finlay Innovation Award (1990), the Nakayama Prize (1994), the Cosmos Prize (1997), the Medal of the Presidency of the Italian Republic (2001), the Kistler Prize (2001), the Freedom From Religion Foundation's Emperor Has No Clothes Award (2001 and 2002), The Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow's Bicentennial Kelvin Medal (2002), the American Academy of Achievement's Golden Plate Award (2006), and the Nierenberg Prize for Science in the Public Interest (2009). In 2005, the Alfred Toepfer Foundation presented him with its Shakespeare Prize in honor of his "concise and accessible presentation of scientific knowledge."
In 2006, Richard won the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science, and in 2007, the Galaxy British Book Awards named him Author of the Year. In 2003, the Atheist Alliance International began giving the Richard Dawkins Award to "a distinguished individual from the worlds of science, scholarship, education or entertainment, who publicly proclaims the values of secularism and rationalism, upholding scientific truth wherever it may lead." In 2012, a team of Sri Lankan ichthyologists discovered a new genus of freshwater fish and named it Dawkinsia.
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