One side of the membrane is exposed to water in contact with the alkali ovaline rock. … Nick Lane proposes that LUCA was a membrane capped pore in an olavine rock.
Correction: Nick Lane never says the vent itself (in which the proto-cell membranes arose) was made of olivine. The olivine is far underground. Sinking seawater reacts with it (serpentinization) and bubbles back up. It precipitates out into the vents (mineralized sponge “chimneys”) which itself is not olivine.
Here’s what Wikipedia says about Lost City, which Lane gives as an example of a modern alkaline hydrothermal vent:
Once pore waters have permeated the surface and return to the surface, aragonite, brucite, and calcite chimneys are formed as calcium carbonates precipitate out of solution. Younger chimneys are primarily brucite and aragonite, being white and flaky in appearance.
I’ve been wondering how much contraception introduces genetic selection against child abuse tendencies. My tentative belief is “a lot, and so a huge source of suffering is diminishing for future humans”. Big if true.
My guess is that child abuse is disproportionately done by people who did not actively prefer to have the child (at all, or at a particular time in their life). Historically there was little selection for the trait of actively wanting children and being interested in their interiority. Now, because having children loads so much on whether it will feel fulfilling to the parent as an individual, and because the standards for the quality of the parent-child relationship are so high, there’s probably a lot of selection for this.
(The heritability of fertility behavior is maybe 30%, and maybe more so with contraception.)