“What are the best books about Genetics?” We looked at 150 of the top Genetics books, aggregating and ranking them so we could answer that very question!

The top 13 titles, all appearing on 2 or more “Best Genetics” book lists, are ranked below by how many lists they appear on. The remaining 125+ titles, as well as the lists we used, are in alphabetical order at the bottom of the page.

Also, make sure to check out our Best Books About Evolution Book List!

Happy Scrolling!

Top 13 Books About Genetics & Genetic History

13 .) Concepts of Genetics by Klug/Cummings/Spencer

Lists It Appears On:

• Best DNA Testing Kits
• Sanfoundry

For one- or two-term courses in Genetics in the departments of Biology, Zoology, Agriculture or Health Science.This text is known for its clear writing style, emphasis on concepts, visual art program and thoughtful coverage of all areas of genetics. The authors capture students’ interest with up-to-date coverage of cutting edge topics and research. This text will help students connect the science of genetics to the issues of today through interesting and thought-provoking applications.

Purchase / Learn More

12 .) Fear Nothing by Dean Koontz

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• Ranker

Christopher Snow is different from all the other residents of Moonlight Bay, different from anyone you’ve ever met. For Christopher Snow has made his peace with a very rare genetic disorder shared by only one thousand other Americans, a disorder that leaves him dangerously vulnerable to light. His life is filled with the fascinating rituals of one who must embrace the dark. He knows the night as no one else ever will, ever can – the mystery, the beauty, the many terrors, and the eerie, silken rhythms of the night – for it is only at night that he is free. Until the night he witnesses a series of disturbing incidents that sweep him into a violent mystery only he can solve, a mystery that will force him to rise above all fears and confront the many-layered strangeness of Moonlight Bay and its residents.

Purchase / Learn More

11 .) Next by Michael Crichton

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• Ranker

Welcome to our genetic world.Fast, furious, and out of control.This is not the world of the future — it’s the world right now.Is a loved one missing some body parts? Are blondes becoming extinct? Is everyone at your dinner table of the same species? Humans and chimpanzees differ in only 400 genes; is that why an adult human being resembles a chimp fetus? And should that worry us? There’s a new genetic cure for drug addiction — is it worse than the disease?We live in a time of momentous scientific leaps; a time when it’s possible to sell our eggs and sperm online for thousands of dollars; test our spouses for genetic maladies and even frame someone for a genetic crime.We live in a time when one fifth of all our genes are owned by someone else, and an unsuspecting person and his family can be pursued cross-country because they happen to have certain valuable genes within their chromosomes …Devilishly clever, Next blends fact and fiction into a breathless tale of a new world where nothing is what it seems, and a set of new possibilities can open at every turn. Next challenges our sense of reality and notions of morality. Balancing the comic and bizarre with the genuinely frightening and disturbing, Next shatters our assumptions, and reveals shocking new choices where we least expect.

Purchase / Learn More

10 .) Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland by Bryan Sykes

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• Ranker

One of the world’s leading geneticists, Bryan Sykes has helped thousands find their ancestry in the British Isles. Saxons, Vikings, and Celts, which resulted from a systematic ten-year DNA survey of more than 10,000 volunteers, traces the true genetic makeup of the British Isles and its descendants, taking readers from the Pontnewydd cave in North Wales to the resting place of “The Red Lady” of Paviland and the tomb of King Arthur. Genealogy has become a popular pastime of Americans interested in their heritage, and this is the perfect work for anyone interested in finding their heritage in England, Scotland, or Ireland.

Purchase / Learn More

9 .) The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution by Gregory Cochran

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• Ranker

The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution

Purchase / Learn More

8 .) The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design by Richard Dawkins

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• Telegraph

Each copy of the anniversary edition of The Blind Watchmaker features a unique biomorph. No two covers are exactly alike. Acclaimed as the most influential work on evolution written in the last hundred years, The Blind Watchmaker offers an inspiring and accessible introduction to one of the most important scientific discoveries of all time. A brilliant and controversial book which demonstrates that evolution by natural selection – the unconscious, automatic, blind yet essentially non-random process discovered by Darwin – is the only answer to the biggest question of all: why do we exist?

Purchase / Learn More

7 .) The Double Helix by James D. Watson

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• Serious Science

By identifying the structure of DNA, the molecule of life, Francis Crick and James Watson revolutionized biochemistry & won themselves a Nobel Prize. At the time, Watson was only 24, a young scientist hungry to make his mark. His uncompromisingly honest account of the heady days of their thrilling sprint against other world-class researchers to solve one of science’s greatest mysteries gives a dazzlingly clear picture of a world of brilliant scientists with great gifts, very human ambitions & bitter rivalries. With humility unspoiled by false modesty, Watson relates his & Crick’s desperate efforts to beat Linus Pauling to the Holy Grail of life sciences, the identification of the basic building block of life. Never has a scientist been so truthful in capturing in words the flavor of his work.

Purchase / Learn More

6 .) The Epigenetics Revolution by Nessa Carey

Lists It Appears On:

• Boston Globe
• Goodreads

At the beginning of this century enormous progress had been made in genetics. The Human Genome Project finished sequencing human DNA. It seemed it was only a matter of time until we had all the answers to the secrets of life on this planet. The cutting-edge of biology, however, is telling us that we still don’t even know all of the questions. How is it that, despite each cell in your body carrying exactly the same DNA, you don’t have teeth growing out of your eyeballs or toenails on your liver? How is it that identical twins share exactly the same DNA and yet can exhibit dramatic differences in the way that they live and grow? It turns out that cells read the genetic code in DNA more like a script to be interpreted than a mould that replicates the same result each time. This is epigenetics and it’s the fastest-moving field in biology today. The Epigenetics Revolution traces the thrilling path this discipline has taken over the last twenty years. Biologist Nessa Carey deftly explains such diverse phenomena as how queen bees and ants control their colonies, why tortoiseshell cats are always female, why some plants need a period of cold before they can flower, why we age, develop disease and become addicted to drugs, and much more. Most excitingly, Carey reveals the amazing possibilities for humankind that epigenetics offers for us all – and in the surprisingly near future.

Purchase / Learn More

5 .) The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene by Richard Dawkins

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• Ranker

People commonly view evolution as a process of competition between individuals—known as “survival of the fittest”—with the individual representing the “unit of selection.” Richard Dawkins offers a controversial reinterpretation of that idea in The Extended Phenotype, now being reissued to coincide with the publication of the second edition of his highly-acclaimed The Selfish Gene. He proposes that we look at evolution as a battle between genes instead of between whole organisms. We can then view changes in phenotypes—the end products of genes, like eye color or leaf shape, which are usually considered to increase the fitness of an individual—as serving the evolutionary interests of genes. Dawkins makes a convincing case that considering one’s body, personality, and environment as a field of combat in a kind of “arms race” between genes fighting to express themselves on a strand of DNA can clarify and extend the idea of survival of the fittest. This influential and controversial book illuminates the complex world of genetics in an engaging, lively manner.

Purchase / Learn More

4 .) The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• Ranker

The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition—with a new Introduction by the Author Inheriting the mantle of revolutionary biologist from Darwin, Watson, and Crick, Richard Dawkins forced an enormous change in the way we see ourselves and the world with the publication of The Selfish Gene. Suppose, instead of thinking about organisms using genes to reproduce themselves, as we had since Mendel’s work was rediscovered, we turn it around and imagine that “our” genes build and maintain us in order to make more genes. That simple reversal seems to answer many puzzlers which had stumped scientists for years, and we haven’t thought of evolution in the same way since. Why are there miles and miles of “unused” DNA within each of our bodies? Why should a bee give up its own chance to reproduce to help raise her sisters and brothers? With a prophet’s clarity, Dawkins told us the answers from the perspective of molecules competing for limited space and resources to produce more of their own kind. Drawing fascinating examples from every field of biology, he paved the way for a serious re-evaluation of evolution.

Purchase / Learn More

3 .) The Seven Daughters of Eve: The Science That Reveals Our Genetic Ancestry by Bryan Sykes

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• Ranker

One of the most dramatic stories of genetic discovery since James Watson’s The Double Helix—a work whose scientific and cultural reverberations will be discussed for years to come. In 1994 Professor Bryan Sykes, a leading world authority on DNA and human evolution, was called in to examine the frozen remains of a man trapped in glacial ice in northern Italy. News of both the Ice Man’s discovery and his age, which was put at over five thousand years, fascinated scientists and newspapers throughout the world. But what made Sykes’s story particularly revelatory was his successful identification of a genetic descendant of the Ice Man, a woman living in Great Britain today. How was Sykes able to locate a living relative of a man who died thousands of years ago? In The Seven Daughters of Eve, he gives us a firsthand account of his research into a remarkable gene, which passes undiluted from generation to generation through the maternal line. After plotting thousands of DNA sequences from all over the world, Sykes found that they clustered around a handful of distinct groups. Among Europeans and North American Caucasians, there are, in fact, only seven.

Purchase / Learn More

2 .) Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters by Matt Ridley

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• Ranker
• Telegraph

Genome offers extraordinary insight into the ramifications of this incredible breakthrough. By picking one newly discovered gene from each pair of chromosomes and telling its story, Matt Ridley recounts the history of our species and its ancestors from the dawn of life to the brink of future medicine. From Huntington’s disease to cancer, from the applications of gene therapy to the horrors of eugenics, Matt Ridley probes the scientific, philosophical, and moral issues arising as a result of the mapping of the genome. It will help you understand what this scientific milestone means for you, for your children, and for humankind.

Purchase / Learn More

1 .) The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Lists It Appears On:

• Best DNA Testing Kits
• Goodreads
• The DNA Exchange

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning, bestselling author of The Emperor of All Maladies—a magnificent history of the gene and a response to the defining question of the future: What becomes of being human when we learn to “read” and “write” our own genetic information? Siddhartha Mukherjee has a written a biography of the gene as deft, brilliant, and illuminating as his extraordinarily successful biography of cancer. Weaving science, social history, and personal narrative to tell us the story of one of the most important conceptual breakthroughs of modern times, Mukherjee animates the quest to understand human heredity and its surprising influence on our lives, personalities, identities, fates, and choices. Throughout the narrative, the story of Mukherjee’s own family—with its tragic and bewildering history of mental illness—cuts like a bright, red line, reminding us of the many questions that hang over our ability to translate the science of genetics from the laboratory to the real world. In superb prose and with an instinct for the dramatic scene, he describes the centuries of research and experimentation—from Aristotle and Pythagoras to Mendel and Darwin, from Boveri and Morgan to Crick, Watson and Franklin, all the way through the revolutionary twenty-first century innovators who mapped the human genome. As The New Yorker said of The Emperor of All Maladies, “It’s hard to think of many books for a general audience that have rendered any area of modern science and technology with such intelligence, accessibility, and compassion…An extraordinary achievement.” Riveting, revelatory, and magisterial history of a scientific idea coming to life, and an essential preparation for the moral complexity introduced by our ability to create or “write” the human genome, The Gene is a must-read for everyone concerned about the definition and future of humanity. This is the most crucial science of our time, intimately explained by a master.

Purchase / Learn More

The 125+ Additional Best Genetic Books

11 Best Books About Genetics Sources/Lists