A frequently touching domestic drama about an academic Chicago family, it mulls Big Themes: war, faith, heredity.
Not surprisingly, then, this is a book about heredity, about fathers and sons and their awkward relationships.
The laws of evolution, of heredity, of adaptation, hold good with human beings as with all other creatures of nature.
A guinea pig, a guinea pig, a guinea pig, howled the student of heredity.
Most of its motives are purely instinctive, and all the mental life that it has is the result of heredity (birth inheritance).
Once that is conceded, the main argument of Grossmann's 'heredity' is invalidated.
In the symmetry of the dividing cell the basis of that resemblance which we call heredity is contained'.
Such passions as heredity had endowed him with had been drugged by training.
The new constitution proclaimed the heredity of the Bohemian crown in the house of Habsburg.
But this is amply explained by the ordinary law of heredity.
1530s, from Middle French hérédité (12c.), from Latin hereditatem (nominative hereditas) "heirship, inheritance, condition of being an heir," from heres (genitive heredis) "heir, heiress," from PIE root *ghe- "to be empty, left behind" (cf. Greek khera "widow"). Legal sense of "inheritable quality or character" first recorded 1784; the modern biological sense seems to be found first in 1863, introduced by Herbert Spencer.
heredity he·red·i·ty (hə-rěd'ĭ-tē)
n.
The genetic transmission of characteristics from parent to offspring.
One's genetic constitution.
