From reader surveys I know a substantial portion of the people who will see this post are financially well off (of those who aren’t, a large number are students). Therefore, you can invest in some books.
Often people ask me questions related to population genetics in the comments (sometimes I get emails). That is all well and good. But it is always better to be able to fish than have to ask for fish. Additionally, learning some population and quantitative genetics allows you to develop some tacit schemas through which you can process information coming at you, and through with you can develop some general intuition.
If you have a modest level of mathematical fluency and and the disposable income, here are three indispensable books which are like the keys to the kingdom:
* Elements of Evolutionary Genetics
* Principles of Population Genetics
* Introduction to Quantitative Genetics.
If you don’t have the cash to spare, there are online notes which are pretty good:
* Graham Coop’s Population Genetics notes
* Joe Felsenstein’s Theoretical Evolutionary Genetics
There are others online resources, but they are not as comprehensive. John Gillespie’s Population Genetics: A Concise Guide is good as very gentle introductions go, but if you are going to spend money, I think just plumping down for a more comprehensive textbook (which will have more genomics in it) is better over the long run.
The goal of getting these books isn’t to make you a population geneticist, but, if you are interested in evolutionary questions it gives you a powerful toolkit. Really nothing in evolutionary process makes sense except in the light of population genetics.