After the Auroch Ing Minority Groups, Educational Level, Social Class Or Emma Marris Is Gripped by an Account of Our Love-Hate Geographic Area

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COMMENT BOOKS & ARTS that behaviour also influences the longer lifespan of women. In the study, children of either sex who were drawn to masculine careers (those shown by tests to be mostly preferred by men, such as being a mechanical engineer or pilot) had a shorter lifespan than those who preferred more feminine occupations PALEOART/SPL MARK HALLETT (such as being an interior decorator or working with children). Thus, cultural dimensions may explain why life expec- tancy for the sexes differs over time and between countries and cultures. There are caveats to this milestone study. One issue is that it was originally planned for a narrower purpose: to inves- tigate predictions of career success and failure. Terman “Children of picked white either sex who pupils with were drawn high IQs from to masculine San Francisco Giant ground sloths went extinct some 10,000 years ago, but could provide conservation lessons for today. careers had a schools, so the sample is not shorter lifespan representative of CONSERVATION than those the wider popu- who preferred lation. Conclu- more feminine sions cannot be occupations.” drawn concern- After the auroch ing minority groups, educational level, social class or Emma Marris is gripped by an account of our love-hate geographic area. The authors do their best relationship with extinct megafauna. to account for these limitations in their analyses. Another problem is inevitable in any t puzzles me that the many large, now rugged landscapes longitudinal study. Terman’s subjects, extinct mammals of the Pleistocene begin to look tame who were born around 1910, had very Epoch have nowhere near the legions and denuded. North different lives from ours. Many soci- Iof fans claimed by dinosaurs. Mammals America’s wolves and etal changes have occurred in the past win the popularity contests among existing grizzlies no longer century, particularly in gender roles. animals, yet few children can rattle off the thrill; Yellowstone Park Terman’s subjects, known as Termites, weights and dietary habits of the gargantuan looks like a petting zoo. lived at a time when most women were North American ground sloth Megalonyx “We live in a highly expected to stay at home. The different jeffersonii or Australia’s massive buck- abnormal world,” life choices available today are likely to toothed marsupial Diprotodon optatum. writes Levy, quoting result in smaller gender differences in Stegosaurus gets all the love. US palaeoecologist Once and Future Giants: What Ice health and longevity. One fanciful explanation is that we have David Burney. “We Age Extinctions The Longevity Project focuses mainly an abiding guilt for having killed them all think of ground sloths Tell Us About the on the individual. The role of society in off in our spear-hurling days. And it seems and saber-toothed cats Fate of Earth’s fostering good heath and long life is likely that human hunting played some as peculiar and for- Largest Animals seldom mentioned in the book, except part in many of these extinctions. In Once eign, but it is the world SHARON LEVY when exposing the failure of current and Future Giants, biologist and journalist of our own ancestry, Oxford University Press: 2011. 280 pp. health propaganda. Despite ubiquitous Sharon Levy lays out the evidence for this the world our species $24.95 recommendations to eat less and keep theory — and explores what this species evolved in.” fit, obesity rates in the United States and drain can teach us now. The patterns and So, scientists and conservationists in many other developed countries are consequences of the Pleistocene die-offs can who can easily envision the landscapes of soaring. The authors recognize that other help us to predict how landscapes will change 13,000 years ago, just before the late Pleisto- studies are badly needed to examine the if we lose big mammals, and help us to spot cene extinctions, find themselves yearning impacts of public policy on health and to warning signs of impending extinctions. for the past. They are starting to experiment develop more successful approaches. As As we hesitantly take collective respon- with restoring these landscapes by introduc- they show in this excellent book, it will be sibility for these extinctions, we feel their ing surrogates to fill long-vacant ecological a difficult task. But it is necessary. ■ loss more keenly. Today’s ‘wild’ has dimin- roles — to graze, to browse, to kill, to knock ished along with the over trees, even to terrify. Marten Lagergren is an assistant megafauna. Spend NATURE.COM Levy recounts various rewilding experi- professor at the Stockholm Gerontology enough time studying For more on ments. Some have been intentional, such as Research Center, Stockholm, Sweden. mastodons and moa, Pleistocene parks: the Pleistocene Park nature reserve in north- e-mail: [email protected] and even our most go.nature.com/kt4vnz eastern Siberia, where rare native Yakutian

444 | NATURE | VOL 471 | 24 MARCH 2011 © 2011 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved BOOKS & ARTS COMMENT horses roam. Others were accidental, such as the wild-mustang preserves of the Amer- ican West. She reports on recent research Books in brief supporting the notion that large animals are more than simply appealing — they can On Being: A Scientist’s Exploration of the Great Questions be major engineers of their ecosystems. Big of Existence predators such as the wolves of Yellowstone Peter Atkins Oxford University Press 152 pp. $19.95 (2011) prevent herbivores from munching plant Why are we here? Chemist and author Peter Atkins answers this big populations into oblivion and keep a lid on question succinctly and elegantly in this slim volume. Following in smaller predators. Big herbivores like the the footsteps of rationalists such as Richard Dawkins, he argues that musk oxen of Greenland stop forests and we should find as much awe in the workings of science as we might weeds from overrunning the earth. They in any god. Although he acknowledges the role of spiritual beliefs fertilize with their dung, and turn the earth in society and the comfort they can bring to some, he finds greater with their big hooves. solace in the scientific underpinnings of origins and endings, birth Levy notes that many of the surrogates and death. that conservationists use are the domesticated descendants of wild creatures. Specially bred cattle are used as proxies for Naked Genes: Reinventing the Human in the Molecular Age extinct aurochs, the giant wild cattle that Helga Nowotny and Giuseppe Testa MIT Press 192 pp. £18.95 (2011) once roamed Europe, but Levy says that Advances in the life sciences have revealed many previously hidden the modern cattle pale in comparison. Real aspects of biology, from the genes and proteins within cells to the aurochs — the kind painted by our ances- developmental stages of the fetus. European Research Council tors in caves — were “longer of leg, bigger of president Helga Nowotny and stem-cell scientist Giuseppe Testa brain, more graceful and fearless than their argue that these building blocks are not valueless, but are ‘naked’ domesticated brethren”, she speculates. blank canvasses that take on multiple meanings in different social The slightly mournful lesson of the contexts, from court rooms to parliaments. They assess how these book is this: any large animals we add to varied perspectives influence attitudes to biotechnology in topics landscapes must be carefully managed. such as assisted reproduction and personalized medicine. For example, condors reintroduced in the United States wear radio collars; wild mus- tangs are rounded up by the US government, Pox: An American History (Penguin History of American Life) dividing family groups and leaving excess Michael Willrich Penguin Press 400 pp. $27.95 (2011) animals held in pens. What differentiates Attitudes to public-health interventions have not changed much in such animals from pets? the past 100 years, explains historian Michael Willrich. He describes To be truly wild, according to Levy, how measures at the turn of the last century to stem the spread animals must have their numbers con- of a smallpox epidemic in the United States — using quarantines, trolled by wild predators, not by humans. pesthouses and ‘virus squads’ — were met with suspicion and They must also live with fear. “The threat of popular resistance despite their success. A well-organized a hungry carnivore lurking at the water hole anti-vaccination movement sprang up to champion personal is the essence of the truly wild horse,” she choice over powerful government, resulting in the disputed political writes. And yet the idea of reintroducing landscape around inoculation that is familiar today. predators — the key to wildness — is the most difficult to sell to local peoples around the world. Conservationists might love the Beyond the Finite: The Sublime in Art and Science thought of introducing African lions to the Edited by Roald Hoffmann and Iain Boyd Whyte Oxford University Great Plains in a bid to fill the gap left by Press 208 pp. $24.95 (2011) the extinct American lion, but ranchers How should we depict protein folding or negative mass? Scientists and rural residents understandably have must create new imagery to describe such natural concepts every qualms. day, and in that sense they have a lot in common with artists who “We cannot raise the auroch, but its attempt to display the sublime. Nine scholars of science and art tamed descendent may yet fill a vital ecolog- convey their perspectives in this volume. From the beauty of images ical niche,” concludes Levy in her examina- taken by the Hubble Space Telescope to quantum romanticism, the tion of the increasing use of domestic cattle contributors touch on natural aesthetics in physics, neuroscience, in conservation projects. Where once there chemistry, painting and music. were mammoths clashing tusks, giant short- faced kangaroos and woolly rhinoceroses, we now have Bessie the cow, grazing and Bird Watch: A Survey of Planet Earth’s Changing Ecosystems fertilizing the soil and raising her head in Martin Walters University of Chicago Press 256 pp. $45 (2011) vague interest as cars whizz past. It is one Bird populations worldwide are threatened by climate change way of plugging the megafauna gap, but and environmental destruction. This illustrated survey, produced I long for the grandeur and strangeness of in cooperation with the global conservation partnership BirdLife those lost giants. ■ International, documents all 1,227 endangered bird species on the Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Emma Marris is a writer based in Region by region, the book describes the birds’ habitats and the Columbia, Missouri. environmental pressures on them, as well as charting conservation e-mail: [email protected] efforts and top birding sites around the globe.