The Developmental Gene Hypothesis for Punctuated Equilibrium: Combined Roles of Developmental Regulatory Genes and Transposable Elements

The Physics and Metaphysics of Social Powers: Bridging Cognitive Processing and Social Dynamics, a New Perspective on Power Through Active Inference

Power operates across multiple scales, from physical action to complex social dynamics, and is constrained by fundamental principles. In the social realm, power is shaped by interactions and cognitive capacity: socially-facilitated empowerment enhances an agent's information-processing ability, either by delegating tasks or leveraging collective resources. This computational advantage expands access to policies and buffers against vulnerabilities, amplifying an individual's or group's influence. In AIF, social power emerges from the capacity to attract attention and process information effectively. Our semantic habitat-narratives, ideologies, representations, etc.-functions through attentional scripts that coordinate social behavior. Shared scripts shape power dynamics by structuring collective attention. Speculative scripts serve as cognitive tools for low-risk learning, allowing agents to explore counterfactuals and refine predictive models. However, dominant scripts can reinforce misinformation, echo chambers, and power imbalances by directing collective attention toward self-reinforcing policies. We argue that power through scripts stems not only from associations with influential agents but also from the ability to efficiently process information, creating a feedback loop of increasing influence. This reframes power beyond traditional material and cultural dimensions, towards an informational and computational paradigm-what we term possibilistic power, i.e., the capacity to explore and shape future trajectories. Understanding these mechanisms has critical implications for political organization and technological foresight.

Transposable element-derived sequences in vertebrate development

Transposable elements (TEs) are major components of all vertebrate genomes that can cause deleterious insertions and genomic instability. However, depending on the specific genomic context of their insertion site, TE sequences can sometimes get positively selected, leading to what are called "exaptation" events. TE sequence exaptation constitutes an important source of novelties for gene, genome and organism evolution, giving rise to new regulatory sequences, protein-coding exons/genes and non-coding RNAs, which can play various roles beneficial to the host. In this review, we focus on the development of vertebrates, which present many derived traits such as bones, adaptive immunity and a complex brain. We illustrate how TE-derived sequences have given rise to developmental innovations in vertebrates and how they thereby contributed to the evolutionary success of this lineage.