Happy Labor Day! (to Americans)
A few days ago someone asked about books on genetics. More specifically, textbooks. I didn’t know what to say really, because “genetics” is a big field. Genetics on the evolutionary/population scale is a rather abstract field of analysis. Genetics in the molecular sense is a concrete physical science. For my qualifying exam I went with Introduction to Genetic Analysis. Though the title emphasizes the classical genetic analytic framework (i.e., Mendelism as formulated in the early 20th century), there is coverage of fields as diverse as quantitative genetics and genomics. I particularly liked the deep treatment of meiosis, in both its biophysical and analytic dimension. For molecular genetics, I can’t complain about Molecular Biology of the Gene, though people who actually do molecular biology would have an opinion you might want to listen to. At the other end of the spectrum Principles of Population Genetics is the easy choice. Though I really like Elements of Evolutionary Genetics, at least the parts I’ve had time to work through.
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