population

A population is a set of >actors linked via network relations and with common properties that determine the relative performance of the actors in a common selective context. Populations are the basic unit of evolutionary analysis, so that "population thinking" has been identified as its hallmark. This means that evolution is conceived as the change of the distribution of variants in a population of actors. The >VSR paradigm can only be applied meaningfully on the population level.

This approach has many consequences for modelling and analysis. One of the most fundamental distinctions is between phenomena which are >frequency-dependent and -independent. A fundamental law in evolutionary analysis has been formulated by statistician R.A. Fisher and is most widely used in EE simulation. This is the functional dependency of the growth of average fitness (level of performance) on the variety of properties in a population: The higher the variety, the larger the growth rate. This is the distance from the mean dynamic of a replicator process.

Basic References

In biology, the population approach has been most forcefully advanced by Ernst Mayr. There is a website on this:
On population thinking

In the EE context, population thinking is most elaborated in organization theory, see:
Howard Aldrich, Organizations Evolving, London: Sage, 1999.

On the modelling of population processes in EE based on Fisher's laws,
see
J. Stanley Metcalfe, Evolutionary Economics and Creative Destruction, Routledge: London/New York 1998.

Semantic Field
network
population   VSR-paradigm
frequency dependency