- Darwin and the first evolutionary synthesis: Its grandeur, constraints, and difficulties
- Genetics and the "black day" of Darwinism
- Population genetics, Fisher's theorem, fitness landscapes, drift, and draft
- Positive and purifying (negative) selection: Classifying the forms of selection
- Modern Synthesis
- Synopsis
- Recommended further reading
Recommended further reading
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Futuyma, Douglas. (2009) Evolution, 2d edition. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates.
Probably the best available undergraduate text on evolutionary biology.
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Gould, Stephen Jay. (2002) The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
The almost 1,500-page tome obviously is not for the feeble at heart, and not many will read it in its entirety. Nevertheless, at least the first part is valuable for its clear and witty presentation of the history of evolutionary biology and its pointed critique of Modern Synthesis.
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Hartl, Daniel L., and Andrew G. Clark. (2006) Principles of Population Genetics, 4th edition. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates.
An excellent, fairly advanced, but accessible textbook on population genetics.
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Mayr, Ernst. (2002) What Evolution Is. New York: Basic Books.
A basic but clear and useful presentation of classical evolutionary biology by one of the architects of Modern Synthesis.
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Schroedinger, Erwin. (1992) What Is Life?: With "Mind and Matter" and "Autobiographical Sketches." Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
The first edition of this wonderful book was published in 1944, on the basis of a series of lectures that Schroedinger (one of the founders of quantum mechanics) delivered in Edinburgh, where he stayed during World War II. Obviously outdated, but remarkably lucid, prescient, and still relevant in the discussion of the role of entropy and information in biology.