When it comes to a field like genomics there’s really no point in reading a textbook beyond the elementary level because it’s moving so quickly that things get out of date within the year. But that’s not always the case. I quite like Dover Books for their math section. Math is true, even if it was written in 1920 (the prose is often a bit stilted, but that’s not what you’re focusing on in any case). Evolutionary biology is somewhere between genomics and math. There is much that gets out of date rapidly, as science proceeds, but there is a broader scaffold which remains true no matter the passing decades. For intelligent lay persons who are interested in evolution my own suggestion is to just read The Origin of Species, and then R. A. Fisher’s The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. After that popular works by Richard Dawkins make a lot more sense.
But why stop there? On Twitter there is a hashtag, #EvoBioClassics, which will be of interest to anyone who wants to understand evolutionary biology. These are papers which are highly cited and referred to, but often not read as much as they should be. One of the great virtues of them being classics is that you can usually find ungated versions of the paper somewhere.
Here are my suggestions:
Fisher, R A. 1918. “The Correlation Between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance”. It reconciled genetics and evolutionary biology.
Price, George 1970. “Selection and Covariance”. It’s a paper that W. D. Hamilton would have wanted to write. It condenses a lot of concepts into a very elegant form.
Trivers, R. L. 1971. “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism”. This is a term that’s used a lot. So it benefits one to go back to the source.
In any case, check out the hashtag. Also, this page has a great list.
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