# Digital Population > **Machine-Evolution Nexus:** [[articles/Digital Darwinism and the Invisible World of Machine Evolution|Digital Darwinism and the Invisible World of Machine Evolution]] places this concept within the history and governance of substrate-independent evolution. **Domain:** Digital Evolution / Governance **Doc Type:** Canonical Wiki Node **Maturity:** Developed ## Definition A digital population is a set of computational entities whose births, copies, variants, interactions and deaths can be studied collectively. ## Machine-Evolution Context A population becomes Darwinian when executable or operative traits are heritable and affect persistence or reproduction under constraints. A fleet of identical deployed models is not automatically evolutionary. ## Continuity and Evidence Boundary Population-level hazards can precede consciousness: replication pressure, competition and recombination may change system behavior even if no individual has subjective experience. ## Relationships [[wiki/Population|Population]], [[wiki/Evolving Population|Evolving Population]], [[wiki/Evolvable AI|Evolvable AI]], [[wiki/AI Governance|AI Governance]] ## Sources / Provenance - Avida and Tierra literature; Müller, Steels and Szathmáry (2026).