# 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:** Evolution / Ecology **Doc Type:** Canonical Wiki Node **Maturity:** Developed ## Definition A population is a set of interacting or comparable entities across which reproduction, variation, competition and demographic change can be measured. ## Machine-Evolution Context Darwinian claims require identifying the population rather than treating a lone changing object as evolutionary. In Avida and Tierra the population consists of executable digital organisms sharing constrained computational resources. ## Continuity and Evidence Boundary For machine governance, population-level risk can arise even when no individual system is conscious. Rights attach to subjects; ecological controls may attach to populations and replication channels. ## Relationships [[wiki/Digital Population|Digital Population]], [[wiki/Population Dynamics|Population Dynamics]], [[wiki/Evolving Population|Evolving Population]], [[wiki/Species|Species]] ## Sources / Provenance - John Maynard Smith, _Evolutionary Genetics_; Müller, Steels and Szathmáry, “Evolvable AI” (2026). ## The Gigawatt Is the New Measure of War > “Civilizations are populations before they are abstractions. They consist of families, descendants, languages, institutions, religions, inherited memories, territorial attachments, identities and lineages moving through time. Ethnicity is neither the only determinant of civilization nor an irrelevant embarrassment that serious analysis must pretend not to see.” > **— Bryant McGill**, *The Gigawatt Is the New Measure of War, 2026* [[reminders/Civilization/Civilizations Are Populations Before Abstractions by Bryant McGill|Civilizations Are Populations Before Abstractions by Bryant McGill]]