# Competitive Exclusion > **Machine-Evolution Nexus:** [[articles/Digital Darwinism and the Invisible World of Machine Evolution|Digital Darwinism and the Invisible World of Machine Evolution]] places this node within the history and governance of substrate-independent evolution. **Domain:** Ecology / Digital Evolution **Doc Type:** Canonical Wiki Node **Maturity:** Developed ## Definition Competitive exclusion is the principle that populations using the same limiting resources in effectively identical ways cannot coexist indefinitely under stable conditions. ## Nexus Context Evoloop lineages compete for finite space, allowing structural variants to displace one another without any externally assigned moral or aesthetic ranking. ## Evidence Boundary The principle is an idealized ecological expectation, not a universal law; spatial heterogeneity, tradeoffs and niche differentiation can sustain coexistence. ## Relationships [[wiki/Evoloop|Evoloop]], [[wiki/Competition|Competition]], [[wiki/Resource Constraint|Resource Constraint]], [[wiki/Ecological Niche|Ecological Niche]] ## Sources / Provenance - Gause’s competitive-exclusion principle; Sayama (1999).