Equation 2 · Part 6 · From Origins to Frontier: A History of Evolutionary Biology and Ecology
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What this part means
Capital delta attached to a quantity marks a difference between two values of that quantity; the article’s sign convention determines the order.
Its job in the formula
Capital delta attached to a quantity marks a difference between two values of that quantity; the article’s sign convention determines the order.
Full expression→change→Article meaning
The passage around this formula
Sewall Wright’s 1931 paper, “Evolution in Mendelian Populations,” added the piece Fisher’s and Haldane’s more deterministic treatments lacked: a formal account of genetic drift, the random change in allele frequency from generation to generation caused by finite population size [ 3 ] . Wright showed that in a randomly mating population of effective size , the variance in allele frequency change per generation from sampling alone is . for a diploid population starting at allele frequency p . This single expression carries a real consequence: small populations can fix or lose alleles by chance alone, independent of whether those alleles are beneficial, neutral, or mildly…
Learn the underlying idea
Addition combines quantities; subtraction measures the signed difference between them. Parentheses show what is combined before the rest of the expression is evaluated.
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Sources cited in the surrounding passage
These citations provide research context; check each source for the exact claim it supports.