Best Books about Evolution and Biology

 Science is under attack from many quarters these days.  These books give  excellent introductions to modern evolution and biology.

This book explains one of the most famous examples of evolution - Darwin's finches. The original population from the mainland Ecuador became isolated on the Galapago islands, and different paths led to variants; eventually if isolated long enough the variants can be recognized as separate species

Meanwhile, on the mainland any beneficial changes would quickly spread through the entire population, so that group would also differ from the original colonizers. The book follows current researchers in the Galapagos

Species is really an artificial construct - for most large animals, it's easy, say, to tell lions from tigers. but yaks and cattle interbreed and their offspring are backcrossed leading to many intermediate forms. Thus you'll never 'see' a species jump out of nothing. it's only after the 2 populations have changed enough that you can declare there's a new species

Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors - by Nicholas Wade. The last 50 years have been amazing in the breadth, quantity and quality of new information uncovered about human origins. ' Before the Dawn' recaps the last half century of research. Easily the best evolution book for the non-scientist since ‘Beak of the Finch’. Some of the topics covered in ‘Before the Dawn’ will be familiar to readers of the Tuesday Science section of the New York Times. Some of the chapters in book started as articles Nicholas Wade has written for those Science pages. In this book he synthesizes those earlier pieces and then describes the new consensus developing. For example, new research in genetics and molecular biology supports once heretical theories like Greenberg’s on language. In a time when scientific ignorance is getting worse in America, books like Wade's are essential.

Evolution of Cooperation Robert Axelrod - If all living organisms evolve by competing, how can cooperation ever emerge? Despite the abundant evidence for cooperation, there was no purely naturalistic answer to this question until 1979. That's when Robert Axelrod ran a now famous computer tournament featuring the standard game-theory challenge called The Prisoner's Dilemma. To everyone's surprise, the computer program that won, named Tit for Tat, was not only the simplest but also the most "cooperative" entrant. This book looks at other examples of cooperation when communication is limited. Also fascinating are his studies of altruism in World War I and other conflicts, where troops arranged truces and cease fires without any direct communication. Much of the work described here was ground breaking when first published, but now is established.

Hopeful Monsters shows the interplay of biology, physics, philosophy and politics. Skipping the usual banal comparisons, we're embedded in the period between the world wars. Themes of uncertainty, quantum mechanics and relativity weave the plot. Following a British boy and a German girl, the book proceeds in a series of backlooking narratives that take place in the major cockpits of the 1920 - 1930s - from Weimar Berlin to Bolshevik Russia and Civil War Spain. With Fascism and Communism playing for dominance across the continent, politics is brutal and vital. But the characters also try to find a way to create a meaningful life. Significant characters whose views permeate the book include Wittgenstein, Heideigger,the Lamarckian scientists Kammerer and Lysenko, Einstein, and many others. Never a didactic presentation, the novel presents a clear understanding of the major intellectual trends of the 20th century. Others have set their stories in this fermentive period but usually just as a background. Here it's an essential element to the plot.

Great for book club discussions - you'll find no end of ways to interpret and discuss this book.