Heredity, also called inheritance or biological inheritance, is the passing on of traits from parents to their offspring; either through asexual reproduction or sexual reproduction, the offspring cells or organisms acquire the genetic information of their parents.
The concept of heredity encompasses two seemingly paradoxical observations: the constancy of a species between generations and the variation among individuals within a species.
In genetics, Mendel’s laws of heredity provide the basic ‘rules’. Recent decades have seen an explosion in discoveries that violate these rules, which has driven the field of genetics forward.heredity, Transmission of traits from parents to offspring through genes, the functional units of heritable material that are found within all living cells.