Books and Arts -- Book ReviewEvolution -- Creature comfortsLife as We Made It. By Beth Shapiro.Humans are a force of nature.This paradoxical thought is the glue that holds “Life as We Made It” together.But it is not the environment-changing effects of human activity on land, sea and air that intrigue Beth Shapiro -- or not directly.Instead, she looks at how people have altered living organisms themselves, exerting an evolutionary pressure on other species.If turning aurochs into cattle, wolves into dogs or teosinte into maize sounds like a sideshow compared with transforming the composition of the atmosphere, looting the oceans or destroying the rainforests, consider a few facts.The most common species of bird is Gallus gallus, the domestic chicken.Even excluding people themselves, the biomass of domesticated mammals exceeds that of the wild sort by a factor of 14.A third of Earth’s dry land (deserts and ice caps included) is devoted either to growing domesticated plants for human consumption or to the nutrition of domestic animals.How this came about, and where it is leading, are Dr Shapiro’s topics.Her day job is as an evolutionary molecular biologist -- a recent field, but one just old enough in 1999, when her research career got going, for lots of the good stuff to have been snaffled already.
