Very often I get a question of the form “what book should I read to understand evolution?” This is a somewhat awkward issue for me. Unlike with population genetics the only textbook I’ve read to understanding evolution is Doug Futuyma’s originally titled Evolution. Of course The Origin of Species is an easy suggestion. But beyond that I’m not quite sure. I know some people think that Stephen Jay Gould’s The Structure of Evolutionary Theory is an important work, but I’m of the camp that it is really just a somewhat prolix reduction of only Gould’s very idiosyncratic thoughts. A major problem with this whole question is that “evolution” encompasses many distinct fields, from natural history all the way to population genetics (the old Neo-Darwinian Synthesis has been modified and appended by new fields such as evolutionary ecology). I know my way around pop gen, but really am at a loss (unfortunately) as to the scientific literature in natural history and macroevolutionary processes.
Though I do think Mark Ridley’s reader, Evolution, is quite good (I don’t know about the textbook of the same name by Ridley because I haven’t read it). Ernst Mayr’s What Evolution Is is more like a very soft primer for those with weak science backgrounds, rather than a nuts & bolts treatment. Richard Dawkins’ scientific works have the same problem as Gould’s, they give a very personal perspective of evolutionary theory (though I like them quite a bit more because Dawkins is less an outlier than Gould was).
Reader comments/suggestions welcome here. For genetics though I can make an informed comment. If you want keep it manageable, then it’s John Maynard Smith’s dense but compact textbook. If you are ambitious, Charlesworth & Charlesworth. Also, I know it’s a bit “old” now, but Joe Felsenstein’s Inferring Phylogenies is great (this another case where the author has his own particular perspective, but he’s a very eminent scientist respected by all, so that’s OK).
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