Classic Works in Evolutionary Biology
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This article is still under construction. Expect it to change frequently until this notice is removed. |
What is This Page?
This page grew out of a graduate seminar taught in EEB during the spring semester, 2008, by Kurt Schwenk. There was a general consensus that it would be useful to graduate students and the EEB community at large to have continuing access to the papers and book selections that were read during the semester, as well as additional papers included in the master list of 'classic' works in evolutionar biology. Many of these pdfs are available here (see below).
What is 'The Master List'?
The 'master list' is a list of classic works in evolutionary biology that I (Kurt Schwenk) compiled and partially annotated during the course of the semester. It was created based on my own choices, as well as suggestions from EEB colleagues and various web sources. Obviously there are potentially as many lists of 'classic works' as there are evolutionary biologists - this particular list is not intended to be definitive. It reflects, to some degree, my own personal biases. However, an attempt was made to be inclusive; for example, there are a number of very important botanical references (thanks largely to Carl Schlichting), as well as obviously important works in population genetics, molecular biology and other areas I can hardly claim expertise in. As much as possible, I included only works that are generally important to evolutionary biology, as a whole, rather than the many papers that are of more circumscribed, if nonetheless critical, importance to a particular subdisciplines (e.g., phylogenetic analysis) or within a particular taxon (I admit that a couple of important vertebrate papers somehow wandered into the list...). I excluded books and papers that are too recent. Thus, while there is no doubt that Schlichting and Pigliucci's Phenotypic Evolution (1998) (for example) will be considered a classic in the future, it is simply too recently published to have achieved such status at this time (we might want to add a separate section entitled with the oxymoron 'Modern Classics' for such works). Finally, I note that several of the listed works are followed by an indented sublist of related papers that are , themselves, not necessarily 'classics', but are nevertheless helpful in interpreting or appreciating the significance of the listed work. This is an area where emmendations/additions/annotations might be particularly useful
A Comment on Modifying the Master List
A great advantage of using an EEBedia page for this purpose is that it can be edited and ammended by the EEB community (thank you Paul Lewis!). However, I have a request - as much as I would like to see additions, changes, annotations, etc., I ask that a copy of the 'original' master list be preserved. Thus, my suggestion is to post a new list with an appropriate new title, or simply post a list of addenda.
If you make additions to the list, I strongly encourage you, whenever possible, to upload pdfs of the new papers. Since one of the principle purposes of this page is to educate and to help graduate students to prepare for their oral qualifying exams, making sources easy to obtain would be a great service. Not everything will be available in electronic format, obviously, but often more is available than one might think (i.e., it is available through web sources outside of JSTOR or other library electronic databases) and can be located by doing a Google search on the title. Scanned documents are good, but watch out for memory hogs - they might clog up the system if they are uploaded to EEBedia.
