2.1 What is a Population?

• roughly, “a particular set of things we care about”
• may be concrete
  • the set of people who will vote in the next election
  • all the trees in some forest
• more generally, is notional
  • the space of outcomes from rolling a pair of dice
  • all possible offspring from a mating pair of fruit flies
  • the collection of physical microstates consistent with a given macrostate
  • etc.