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From: Athel Cornish-Bowden <athel...@yahoo.co.uk>
Newsgroups: alt.usage.english
Subject: Counterfactual conditions
Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2012 17:34:36 +0100
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The other day I wrote the following sentence, and each time I re-read 
it I have a doubt about the last word but three:

"In consequence, if a reaction in a biosynthetic pathway displays 
negative cooperativity with respect to the concentration of its 
substrate, and if the same metabolite acts as an effector of a reaction 
in another pathway, then the flux through the second pathway will be 
more sensitive to the flux through the first than it would be if there 
was no negative cooperativity."

Don't worry about whether you find this an elegantly written sentence 
or not, I'm just thinking about the final if clause. It seems to me to 
be clearly counterfactual, and yet I can't persuade myself that the 
"was" should be "were": it just seems wrong to me with "were".

Would "were" be better?


-- 
athel