I wasn't particularly academic at school, nor was science a major interest. It's to my regret that I simply drifted into it. I was born in Kenya and spent only a short time at a very British-style boarding school in Southern Rhodesia, before my parents returned to England.

There, I attended prep school in Wiltshire and later Oundle School, Northamptonshire. It was only when I was in my second year at Balliol College, Oxford, reading zoology, that I became strongly attracted to science.

I particularly appreciated the tutorial system at Oxford. Being sent away, after an hour spent with your tutor, to work and write essays using original material rather than textbooks was immensely exciting. There you were - a 19-year-old going off and reading up the latest literature on your subject and becoming a world authority. I simply loved it.

It was so different to school. But not everybody likes this system or benefits from it and I'm not sure whether it could be transplanted to schools.

I had the good fortune to have as my tutor Niko Tinbergen, a very famous student of animal behaviour, who later became a Nobel prize-winner. It was my tutorials with him which inspired me to want to go on doing research. He was immensely enthusiastic and utterly logical. He wouldn't let you away with sloppy arguments or failing to define your terms.

Tinbergen was a field naturalist with the eyes of a scientist. Through him, I learned to think scientifically about subjects of which in the past I had only thought emotionally. Through his work on seagulls I learned to look at them as machines which were programmed to survive.

I stayed on, was awarded a doctorate and then got my first job at the University of California in Berkeley. It was the late Sixties and I found Berkeley very intense with a lot of politics and student demonstrations - mayhem, in fact.

I stayed only two years and returned to Oxford as a junior lecturer and I've been there ever since. Recently, I was appointed Charles Simonyi professor of public understanding of science. It's a new chair endowed by Simonyi, a Microsoft millionaire. My job is to promote science to the world.

My new book, Unweaving the Rainbow, is about the importance of science in our culture. I want to promote the view that science is a worthwhile inspiration for life. I'm still teaching undergraduate courses, but it's no longer my main work. I'm teaching a much wider audience now. I'm writing, giving radio broadcasts and public lectures.

Nowadays, scientists are the butt of much criticism, partly because people perceive science as difficult. Part of my work is to say, yes, science is difficult but it can be exciting if you make an effort. People often feel threatened by science - all the more reason then for them to understand it.

It's desperately sad that fewer young people are coming into science nowadays. I hope the trend can be reverted. My book is an effort to do something about it.

I'd like to see science become part of our culture. People should be able to appreciate science without being involved in the minutiae - in the way that it's possible to appreciate music, enjoy it, be a connoisseur, yet not play. At the moment, science erects barriers, but we could have people learning to appreciate science. That's the dominant message of my new book.

Professor Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene Blind Watchmaker, was in conversation with Yvonne Healy. His most recent book is Unweaving the Rainbow, published by Allen Lane at £20 stg