heredity

Heredity is the passing of traits from parents to their offspring, either through asexual reproduction or sexual reproduction. This is the process by which an offspring cell or organism acquires or becomes predisposed to the characteristics of its parent cell or organism. Through heredity, variations exhibited by individuals can accumulate and cause some species to evolve through the natural selection of specific phenotype traits. The study of heredity in biology is called genetics, which includes the field of epigenetics.