BACKGROUND The relative importance of stochasticity versus determinism in soil bacterial communities is unclear, as are the possible influences that alter the balance between these. Here, we investigated the influence of spatial scale on the relative role of stochasticity and determinism in agricultural monocultures consisting only of wheat, thereby minimizing the influence of differences in pl...

Some have argued that chance and determinism are compatible in order to account for the objectivity of probabilities in theories that are compatible with determinism, like Classical Statistical Mechanics (CSM) and Evolutionary Theory (ET). Contrarily, some have argued that chance and determinism are incompatible, and so such probabilities are subjective. In this paper, I argue that both of thes...

Classical electrodynamicsÐif developed consistently, as in Dirac's classical theory of the electronÐis causally non-local. I distinguish two distinct causal locality principles and argue, using Dirac's theory as my main case study, that neither can be reduced to a non-causal principle of local determinism.

Why do some athletes benefit more than others from training and practice? A frequent observation of interindividual variation in response to training and practice raises important theoretical and practical questions about the nature of genetic and environmental constraints on skill acquisition and performance. This problem is a manifestation of the long-standing debate of nature versus nurture,...

Over the past two centuries biomedical science has, at times, provided justification for white privilege. Science has been used to support the proposition that differences in achievement reflect innate differences in ability among racial groups. Broadly speaking, the view that differences in academic achievement, IQ scores, employment status or wealth primarily reflect innate differences is cal...

We establish Choquet-Kendall-Matheron theorems on non-Hausdorff topological spaces. This typical result of random set theory is profitably recast in purely topological terms, using intuitions and tools from domain theory. We obtain three variants of the theorem, each one characterizing distributions, in the form of continuous valuations, over relevant powerdomains of demonic, resp. angelic, res...