The best books that will change the way you think about biology

This is one of my favourite books. It is a palimpsest—a serious document about humanity’s effects on the natural world overlaid with Adams’s hilariously absurdist worldview. This book is different from most other popular science books in that it sort of isn’t one; it’s more of a travel book, with Adams acting as the uninformed everyman repeatedly confronted with the realities of an unfolding ecological tragedy and interpreting them as only he could.

Extinction is not an inherently amusing subject, and this book is a sobering account of how much biological diversity we have already lost, yet at the same time, it is painfully funny. For me, Adams’s recounting of his conversation with an Australian snake venom expert is worth the price of admission on its own.

A tour-de-force of science writing and arguably the best book about ecology and evolution ever written. Quammen’s book covers similar ground to Last Chance to See conceptually, and sometimes literally as several of the same locales are visited. But the similarities end there. As an undergraduate, it opened my eyes to the importance of ecological research and gave me a new appreciation for the contributions to science of the much-maligned Alfred Russell Wallace.

This book is unique in that, despite my enthusiasm for it, I have seldom found the need to re-read it because so much of the content—tenrec reproduction, the circumstances of the discovery that chuckwalla meat is more disagreeable than starvation, how invasive snakes overran Guam—has lived rent-free in my head for almost 30 years.   

This book is another of those books that made a huge impression on me as a student. It’s also one of the very few popular books that I have kept coming back to over and over throughout my professional career.

Scaling isn’t a natural subject for the popular science treatment, given that so much of the relevant scientific literature revolves around esoteric bickering over the values of exponents, but McGowan does a fantastic job of explaining the physical and physiological principles involved. More importantly, he shows the many ways that an organism’s size affects the way that it lives its life and interacts with its environment.

I had never heard of a Reynolds number before reading this book, but afterward, I began to see its consequences everywhere. 

After 25 years as a professional biologist(!), it’s seldom that I come across a book about biology that blows my mind, but this book absolutely did. Both scientists and laymen are mostly interested in the flashy parts of male-male competition and female choice that we can readily observe, but the parts of it that go on “behind the scenes”—that is to say, inside the female reproductive tract—are even more fascinating. 

I read this book only relatively recently since I thought I was already pretty well informed about the ins and outs of sperm competition. I was wrong. Sperm competition is even crazier than I had imagined, and Birkhead writes about it brilliantly. 

Less about biology specifically and more about the general value of the scientific method and rationalism; I think that this book should be read by everyone. Never smug or condescending, Sagan and Druyan show how easily one can be misled by mystical thinking and illustrate the many dangers of credulity.

From cargo cults to baloney detectors, this book is a primer for life in the modern world and how to recognize and protect against disinformation and one’s own biases. I have more than once bought copies of this book for people who are overly enthused about crystals.