Reddit mentions of The Dialectical Biologist

I'll stick to recommending science communication books (those that don't require a deep background on biological concepts):

• On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection - Charles Darwin, bonus points if you can get a 1st edition reprint (before his colleagues made him change a lot of important things); it is a must-read but it might need quite some time to truly understand it, it is a heavy read.
  
  
• A lot of people recommend the Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins but that one is one of his most controversial books and if you decide to read it, you should take everything with a pinch of salt; for Dawkins I prefer to recommend the Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution and the Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design. Just beware of Dawkins, he's a little dogmatic in his approach.
  
  
• The Dialectical Biologist - Richard Levins & Richard Lewontin.
  
  
• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Thomas Kuhn, this one will change forever your conception of science as a whole.
  
  
• The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - Matt Ridley.
  
  
• Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, and the Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History - Stephen J. Gould.
  
  
• The Ghosts of Evolution: Non-sensical Fruit, Missing Partners, and Other Ecological Anachronisms - Connie Barlow.
  
  
• Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? - Frans de Waal, this one is about animal cognition but has an incredible underline of all the deficiencies and prejudges on science.
  
  
• Microbe Hunters - Paul de Kruif.
  
  
• Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution, and What is Life? - Lynn Margulis.
  
  
• The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan.
  
  
• A Short Story of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson.
  
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  For books that everyone studying biology ends up reading, my candidate would be Lehninger's Principles of Biochemistry, by Nelson & Cox but that's a textbook.

Anybody interested in this sort of stuff would do well to check out some of the writings of Richard Lewontin on science and society (NB Lewontin, a pioneer of modern evolutionary biology, is an avowed Marxist).

Today's your lucky day. One of the best books I've read:

http://www.amazon.com/Dialectical-Biologist-Richard-Levins/dp/067420283X

easy to understand for a layman but hugely influential. There's also a followup book which I haven't read but is probably excellent.

http://www.amazon.com/Biology-Under-Influence-Dialectical-agriculture/dp/1583671579/ref=pd_sim_14_2?ie=UTF8&dpID=41BqJjrwY6L&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL320_SR214%2C320_&refRID=0Z4QTS33J5JGVA4YV9GY