Hacker News Books

* The Blue Death, http://www.amazon.com/The-Blue-Death-Disease-Disaster/dp/B00...

* Principles of Neural Science (a canonical textbook)

* Immunobiology

* Genome

Also just finished Genome (http://www.amazon.com/Genome-Autobiography-Species-Chapters-...). Good read, but there are better books in the category.

-- I'm bias, but I think the best entry level book is still from 1998 - Genome by Matt Ridley [1]. It's what got me interested in genomics as a CS undergrad (I read it in 2009). Another decent one is The $1000 Genome [2], it gives a good cross section of genetics in 2010.

-- Our group has a series of intro lecture videos from last academic year [3]. They are fairly up to date, and this year's videos will probably be posted soon.

-- Genomes Unzipped is great if you prefer a blog [4]

-- I think the best way to actually learn this stuff is to just play with the software tools. They all point to open data in the tutorials. Biopython's tutorial is particularly good - just google the biological terms as you go. Bioconductor has some good (though more targeted) tutorials too.

-- Going to talks can be a great way to get a broad overview of the space. Drop me a note if you happen to be located in Boston.

-- Finally, this goes without saying, but don't take articles in the mainstream media at face value. (Including, and in fact in particular, the NYT.) Every time I get together with relatives I have to argue against the latest grand prediction.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Genome-The-Autobiography-Species-Chapt...

[2] http://www.amazon.com/The-000-Genome-Revolution-Personalized...

[3] http://www.broadinstitute.org/scientific-community/science/p...

[4] http://www.genomesunzipped.org/

http://www.mattridley.co.uk/books/

I read his book Genome years ago and thought it was a moderately interesting primer on the revolution in genetic research starting to unfold in the wake of the Human Genome Project.

I'm sorry to discover Viscount Ridley turned out to be such a hack:

https://hansard.parliament.uk/search/MemberContributions?mem...

I know Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr., and he has been a participant in the journal club I mentioned in my top-level comment in this thread. He is a serious researcher on human behavior genetics and he has had publications in Science and other leading journals of peer-reviewed scientific research. I by no means claim that he would endorse all of my opinions about human behavior genetics, nor would I endorse all of his, but I will endorse him as a truth-seeker and straight shooter who attempts to take his opinions where the facts lead him, as he best understands the facts.

A lot of the rest of the tone of your reply is just setting up tribal affiliations and name-calling. But on the substance of what you wrote, perhaps you and I could agree in endorsing a review article by Eric Turkheimer (a colleague and occasional co-author of Bouchard's, and current president of the Behavior Genetics Association):

Turkheimer, E. (2012). Genome wide association studies of behavior are social science. In K. S. Plaisance & T.A.C. Reydon (Eds.) Philosophy of Behavioral Biology (pp. 43-64). New York, NY: Springer.

http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Turkheimer%20GWAS%...

"If the history of empirical psychology has taught researchers anything, it is that correlations between causally distant variables cannot be counted on to lead to coherent etiological models."