1. Bonner, J.T. 1965. Size and Cycle: An Essay on the Structure of Biology. Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton, NJ. The biology of organisms from the life cycle perspective. An outstanding synthesis; stimulating; full of ideas.
2. Corner, E.J. H. 1964. The Life of Plants. Univ. Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. A classic; one of the best biology books of all time.
3. Dawkins, R. 1989. The Selfish Gene, 2nd Ed. Oxford University Press, Oxford, U.K. A well written, speculative, stimulating thesis that the fundamental unit of natural selection is the gene.
4. Dobzhansky, T. 1956. What is an adaptive trait? Am. Nat. 90: 337–347. An eloquent and classic paper emphasizing that traits have no adaptive significance in isolation from the entire organism that expresses them at various developmental stages throughout its life cycle.
5. Jackson, J.B.C., L.W. Buss, and R.E. Cook (Eds.). 1985. Population Biology and Evolution of Clonal Organisms. Yale Univ. Press, New Haven, CT. Collected papers on representative organisms posing a challenge to the definition of ‘the individual’.