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Equation 4 · Part 6 · Seventy-Five Thousand Generations of E. coli, and Counting

addition

wopen(t)=1+a tβw_{\text{open}}(t) = 1 + a\,t^{\beta}
addition

What this part means

Add the term after the plus sign to the term or group before it.

Its job in the formula

Add the term after the plus sign to the term or group before it.

The passage around this formula

which approaches a fixed value of 1 + a/b as t grows without bound, and wopen(t)=1+a tβw_{\text{open}}(t) = 1 + a\,t^{\beta}. for an exponent β\beta between 0 and 1, which keeps rising — more and more slowly, but without any asymptote — for every value of t . Wiser and colleagues derived the second form theoretically from a model combining clonal interference with diminishing-returns epistasis among beneficial mutations, and reported that across 50,000 generations of real data, “mean fitness appears to increase without bound, consistent with a power law” [ 2 ] . The decelerating rate that Lenski’s 1991 paper had already observed over the first 2,000 generations turns out to be compatible with no ceiling at all: a…

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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

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