  The appeal of thermodynamics to problems outside physics is undeniable, as is
the growing recognition of its apparent universality, yet in the absence of a
rigorous formalism divorced from the peculiarities of molecular systems all
attempts to generalize thermodynamics remain qualitative and heuristic at best.
In this paper we formulate a probabilistic theory of thermodynamics and and set
the basis for its application to generic stochastic populations.
