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Genetics and Evolution are central to modern biological understanding. Genetics itself is a huge, rapidly changing field and can be divided into several main categories.
- Classical Genetics
- Quantitative Genetics
- Population Genetics
- Molecular Genetics
- Genetic Engineering
- Genetics and Ethics
- History of Genetics
However, this kind of division is very arbitrary and heavily influenced by historical progression of the different sub-fields. There are additional large fields that could be listed, but are not as primary as the divisions above (and some suffer from hyperbole), such as:
- Ancient DNA
- Conservation Genetics
- Developmental Genetics
- Ecological Genetics
- Epigenetics
- Experimental Evolution
- Genetics and Laws
- Genetic Anthropology
- Human and Medical Genetics
- Metagenomics
- Microbiome Genetics
- Personal Genomics
- Phylogenetics
- Synthetic Biology
- Systems Biology
I am purposely avoiding dividing the field by taxonomy (except for human genetics and related fields). The classical taxonomic divisions of biology are losing their usefulness. A large part of this is due to genetics and evolution where the same basic principles can apply across a wide range of organisms. I am also avoiding separating genetics and genomics, some tools and approaches may be different but these are really ends of a continuum that has been artificially exaggerated.
One way to get started is by reading about what a gene is, genetic heritability versus environmental effects on phenotype variance, and the structure of DNA.
