heredity

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. The genetic transmission of characteristics from parent to offspring.
2. n. The sum of characteristics and associated potentialities transmitted genetically to an individual organism.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. Hereditarydescent or transmission, as of physical or mental qualities; hereditary succession or influence.
2. n. Specifically, in biology: The influence of parents upon offspring; transmission of qualities or characteristics, mental or physical, from parents to offspring. See atavism.
3. n. The principle or fact of inheritance, or the transmission of physical and mental characteristics from parent to offspring, regarded as the conservative factor in evolution, opposing the tendency to variation under conditions of environment.
4. n. Metaphorically, that which makes living beings inherit; the explanation or cause of the kinship or resemblance to ancestors which living beings exhibit, or the force or agent or principle that brings about this kinship or resemblance. This metaphorical use of the word leads to forgetfulness of the fact that the word is only a general term for formulating the facts of kinship, and to the regarding of heredity and variation as independent and antagonistic principles or agents or factors in the origin of species. Since we can separate, in our minds, the kinship of living beings, or their likeness to their kind, from their individuality or difference from their kind, and since we find this intellectual analysis useful, some think that what is intellectually separable must be separate in fact, and that organic development is due to heredity and variation as antagonistic principles or agencies.
5. n. Metaphorically, the substratum or support or bearer or giver or cause of inheritance: that which makes the offspring to be like its parents or ancestors. This meaning (which depends upon an uncritical use of the word substance, and upon the opinion that we account for inheritance by calling it heredity) leads to the belief that since resemblance to parents may be considered by itself, it therefore exists in nature separated from the individuality of living beings.

Wiktionary

1. n. Hereditary transmission of the physical and genetic qualities of parents to their offspring; the biological law by which living beings tend to repeat their characteristics in their descendants.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. (Biol.) Hereditary transmission of the physical and psychical qualities of parents to their offspring; the biological law by which living beings tend to repeat their characteristics in their descendants. See pangenesis.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. the total of inherited attributes
2. n. the biological process whereby genetic factors are transmitted from one generation to the next