Around the Web – March 22nd, 2011

Monuments to Clan Life Are Losing Their Appeal. A rule of thumb is that the Chinese tend to emphasize permanent architecture less than other societies, probably due to the tendency not to use durable materials. The Next Bubble: Farmland. Did not know: "And large-scale farmland bubbles are quite rare: There was only one in the United States in the entire 20th century, during the great population scare of the 1970s." Tortoise and Hare, in a Laboratory Flask. Carl on the new paper out of the Lenski lab. Unknown Animals Nearly Invisible Yet There. There aren't enough labor hours to catalog the tree of life. A Proud ‘Lobbyist’ and ‘Southerner’ Weighs ‘President’. We haven't had a fat president in nearly 100 years. Europe’s Rift Over Energy Is Widened by France. Go France! Less Wrong NYC: Case Study of a Successful Rationalist Chapter. Brass tacks: what's the rate of drop of proportion of virgins over the course of the past year? Law of Averages. Finally, people are responding to the disincentives of low-tier law school attendance! Vaccine to Cure Asthma Brought on by House Dust Mite Allergies?Canine Genetic Wrinkle Has Human Potential. Dog genetics yields important insights for humans. Not too surprising. Dogs and humans exhibit a lot of convergences from different sections of the mammalian bush. The skull that proves those New Stone Age farmers weren't so peaceful after all... My null model is that intra-specific competition results in violence once at the Malthusian limit. Economics and Evolution Help Scientists Identify New Strategy to Control Antibiotic Resistance. This is the sort of thing that's potentially the most potent antidote to Creationism. Sizing Up Kinship: Larger Groups Win. Review of the Kim Hill paper. Hunter-gatherer kinship and band composition. John Hawks on the Kim Hill paper. Population-Based Resequencing of Experimentally Evolved Populations Reveals the Genetic Basis of Body Size Variation in Drosophila melanogaster. A Molecular Phylogeny of Living Primates. A Faded Industrial Town Is Feeling Britain’s Cuts. Half the workers in the public sector? This is not a sustainable ecosystem. Public Jobs as the Ticket to Middle Class Status. Reihan Salam offers some skepticism. Molecular Evolution, Mutation Size and Gene Pleiotropy: A Geometric Reexamination. Return of the Sailer Strategy. I'm feelin' more and more right-wing of late. But no pinker. Wildlife defies Chernobyl radiation. Similar to the phenomenon of wildlife refuges created by land mines.