A few days ago a reader asked for a basic definition of terms which might allow for easier digestion of some of my posts. An easy answer would be to buy Principles of Population Genetics. But barring that what are the basic terms that readers think are useful? For example, it seems likely that allele, haplotype, and selective sweep, would be the sort of basic vocabulary that would help in understanding the posts. On the other hand the coalescent less so, since it doesn’t come up explicitly very often.
In other news, I recently purchased Wakely’s Coalescent Theory: An Introduction and Roff’s Modeling Evolution: An Introduction to Numerical Methods. I also am receiving a review copy of Nessa Carey’s Junk DNA: A Journey Through the Dark Matter of the Genome. Mildly skeptical of the title, though titles aren’t often under the author’s control. This seems to have been what happened with Pat Shipman’s The Invaders: How Humans and Their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction, which is far less about our canine companions than you’d think. One major issue is that many classic texts don’t include extensive treatment of genomics, which is pretty essential to understanding many of the more science oriented posts here.
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