Flags and Lollipops

Thursday, February 02, 2006

Popular science books

Sandra posted a comment a few days ago recommending The Genome War by James Shreeve (which sounds interesting; I'm going to pick it up the next time I'm in town). That got me to thinking about good popular science books about genetics that I've read in the past few years.

Anyway, my list (linked through to Amazon*) would include:

  • Genome, by Matt Ridley : it's a bit of a gimmick, but Ridley organizes his book into 23 chapters, one for each pair of chromosomes. Each chapter then uses a single interesting gene (FOXP2, HD...) from that chromosome as a jumping off point to explore human genetics in more detail. There're many anecdotes, the science is solid and you can't fault Ridley's writing skills - it's a great read. Frankly I don't know why it's not used as a textbook in schools...
  • Mutants, by Armand Leroi : Leroi's book is about the extremes of human genetic variability (variation to the Elephant Man extent). He covers the basics of developmental biology before using famous historical cases of human mutants as a platform to delve deeper. Fascinating stuff. As a sidenote, Gene Expression has an interview with Leroi here.
  • The Origins of Virtue, by Matt Ridley (again) : How did cooperation and moral virtue develop during human evolution? Ridley tries to find some answers through experiments using game theory (which isn't as complicated as it sounds). It's another well written book from Ridley about an interesting topic.
  • DNA: The Secret of Life, by James Watson : Not autobiographical like his other books - there are no unwanted pregnancies, broken marriages or relentless chasing of younger women here. It does have a lot of personal anecdotes in it, naturally - Ewan Birney stayed at Watson's house during his gap year? -and it's that charm that sets Watson's book apart from the crowd. Covers the past, present and future (in Watson's opinion) of DNA - a good read for the lay person.
  • The Extended Phenotype, by Richard Dawkins : Dawkins' follow-up to The Selfish Gene, in which he expounds on what he calls the "extended phenotype" : the effect that a gene has upon the world. In Dawkins' view, there's no reason why phenotypes should stop at the skin or bark. An example he gives is beavers building a dam: a mutated gene which makes one of the beavers, say, build the dam a bit higher (an extended phenotype) might affect its survival just as much as a mutated gene which gives the beaver a slightly longer tail (a traditional phenotype).

Any other suggestions?

* I tried looking for an affiliate code that would send any clickthrough money to charity, but to no avail (if somebody is looking for an interesting web project, they could do worse than develop a clearinghouse for charity affiliate links). Therefore any profit from this post is going straight towards feeding my voracious donut habit.

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At February 06, 2006 11:29 AM, Blogger Pedro Beltrão said...

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