a natural class of dynamical systems is obtained by iterating polynomial maps, which can be viewed as maps from projective space to itself. one can ask which other projective varieties admit endomorphisms of degree greater than 1. this seems to be an extremely restrictive property, with all known examples coming from toric varieties (such as projective space) or abelian varieties. we describe what is known in this direction, with the new ingredient being the "bott vanishing" property. joint work with tatsuro kawakami.