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alt title(s): Inheritance Of Acquired Traits Jean Baptiste Lamarck: What I am saying is that basically, the inheritance of acquired traits change a species over time. Georges Cuvier: And what I am saying is no, that is the stupidest thing anyone has ever heard of.
— "In Theory, Your Theories Could Be Sexier," Kate Beaton
In the Golden Age of Comic Books, there were well established ways for a character to gain their powers: being bitten by a radioactive spider, doing years of Charles Atlas training, having a near-death experience, extensive mystic training, getting an artifact of great power, and scores of other imaginative backstories. With the advent of the Silver Age onwards, these Golden Age heroes had children. Naturally, they inherited their parents' powers and heroic tendencies and many became Legacy Characters, through the sometimes magical agency of Superpowerful Genetics.
Um. Okay. We'll make that deal, for the sake of story.
Tough to see, though, how training is inherited, or how body-mods get passed on. Pretty good chance that any kid that Iron Man might have had would not have been born with rivets. ( Well, it depends on what he has the kid with now doesn't it?)
If the comic or show is rife with My Kung Fu Is Stronger Than Yours, then the superkid will luck out and be at least as powerful as the strongest parent at the time of conception, and often radically more powerful. This can get interesting if a family has more than one kid, as each succeeding one gets stronger. This usually also applies to fighting skills; they'll be a prodigy black belt before they can walk. If the parent got their powers from a magical or technological artifact, they'll have "internalized" and passed on that item's power. To use a real world analogy: if your mom were an IT expert that always carried around a laptop, you'd have a Bluetooth connection in your head and know how to code a Linux kernel from scratch. Just like this xkcd comic.
Other times, if the parent got their power from a Freak Lab Accident involving Applied Phlebotinum, their children will all have that same power, regardless of whether it affected their DNA. This also applies to magic and telepathic powers. Of course, with magic, the reason it's passed down will frequently be less biological than spiritual, so the usual rules need not apply. Another real-world analogy: If your dad were a food tester who developed a high tolerance for poison through controlled exposure, you'd have his high resistance and then some. This one is often Retconned into a Meta Origin or Secret Legacy; for instance, maybe the accident didn't cause your dad's powers, it just unlocked the powers already in his DNA, and he passed the "unlocked" version on to you — and note that this is real science. WE CAN'T MAKE SHIT LIKE THAT UP!
This trope is named for Jean Baptiste Lamarck, a French naturalist whose theories (of which we call Lamarckian evolution) inspired Darwin and eventually led to modern Darwinian evolution. While very insightful, his theory of "Inheritance of Acquired Traits" incorrectly viewed the cause of evolution as the parents' self-improvements in life being passed on to their offspring. Giraffes had long necks because they kept stretching for higher branches over many generations, for instance.
There is a real world phenomenon known as the epigenome, that describes how the DNA expression if not actual DNA can be affected by environmental factors in the lives of ancestors. For instance, famines at certain stages in the lives of grandparents can adjust the rates of diabetes in the grandchildren.
A.K.A. Inheritance Of Acquired Traits. See also Evolutionary Levels. Compare In The Blood for the morality version.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
- Kaitou Saint Tail is the rare breed of Magical Girl whose only power is her Transformation Sequence. Otherwise, she relies on magician's tricks from her father and Phantom Thief skills from her mother.
- Although arguably, she could have merely inherited genes from her mother that let her develop into a more athletic individual, decided on her own to follow in her mother's footsteps as a thief, and simply learned her bag of magic tricks by watching her father as she grew up. Nothing says that Meimi's desire to be a thief or her knowledge of magic tricks came directly from genetics.
- It's never outright stated, but Dragon Ball Z implies that Goten and Trunks can reach Super Saiyan at a young age because their fathers had achieved the level before the boys' birth; compare to Gohan, born before Goku ever became a Super Saiyan, and had to earn it the same way his father and Vegeta did.
- An alternate fan theory is that they achieved it so quickly because nobody ever told them it was supposed to be hard.
- And of course, GT takes this to the extreme in the final episode by showing distant descendants of Goku and Vegeta (Identical Grandsons, actually) can achieve Super Saiyan without even realizing the significance of it.
- Goku implied at one point that the generations after his and Vegeta's are stronger because the enemies they've had to face were much more powerful; Gohan was strong enough to fight Cell at eleven, while Goku at that age was still frolicking in the forest.
- Taking that one step further, Gohan was spoiled rotten for the first five years of his life, had absolutely no form of training during this period and was in fact a complete wuss, but still manifested enough latent ability to hurt Raditz, the guy who thoroughly owned his father. He then acheived Super Saiyan status only a few years later. Trunks, being the son of Vegeta, was likely raised as a fighter from birth. Goten was raised similarly by Chichi, the result being that both mastered their latent powers much earlier.
- It is also implied that Goten was conceived while Goku was in Super-Saijen form, while he and Gohan were 'acclimitising' to their bodies just before the Android/Cell Saga. Arguably, Goten's ability to reach SS at such a young age is because his father was sufficiently 'powered up' at the time to pass on his enhanced spiritual energy.
- The titular power-granting brain parasite of Baoh The Visitor was artificially evolved through the use of a serum that causes Lamarckian evolution. Animals injected with the stuff are deliberately placed in extremely harsh environments, adapt to them, and pass on their adaptations to their offspring, then the next generation is injected and the cycle repeated until something interesting and weapon-ish is produced, leading to the Baoh worm and other rather random creations.
- In Historie, Eumenes is not only naturally intelligent, but he also inherited his natural fighting abilities from his true, Scythian parents.
- We never get to see it in the manga, but according to the author, Kenshin's son, Kenji, manages to master the Hiten Mitsurugi-Ryū style of kendo all by himself, without having ever seen it and figuring it out from mere descriptions, because his father refuses to pass it down to him. So Yeah.
- In Baccano!, Huey Laforet, immortal thanks to the Elixir of Life, sires Chane for the purpose of testing this trope. Turns out that Lamarck Wasn't Right.
- Mahou Sensei Negima toys with this one, as Negi aspires to be just like his father Nagi, the most powerful mage ever. Negi himself turns out to be a prodigy, but his strength comes from his intelligence and constant training, whereas his father was a complete idiot but so naturally powerful that he was practically invincible anyway.
- Amazingly enough, this is actually Gold's special ability. He can pass his will to an unhatched Pokemon. His Togepi turned out to be a avid gambler with a violent temper because its owner carried its egg around arcades and dreamed about it beating the crap out of Silver. His Pichu also turned out to be super powerful and brave because he wanted to protect it and prove himself worthy of being a Dex Holder.
Comic Books
- Alan Scott, the original Green Lantern, had a daughter called Jade, who naturally had all the powers of his ring. He also has a son who has darkness-related powers, which are explained as Alan having been exposed to "Shadowlands energy" during a fight with a demon.
- Man-Bat gained bat-themed powers artificially but his daughter inherited them. When consulted about this, Batman was skeptical, and explicitly said that acquired characteristics can't be inherited. (Despite the number of times that exactly that has happened in the DCU.)
- The current "Battle For The Cowl" miniseries/crossover has begun to fix that. Another villain points out to Langstrom that it's impossible for a mix of common chemicals to have that effect, that the formula was a psychological crutch for the activation of Langstrom's innate super-powers. And indeed, in that same issue he manages to transform without the formula and keep control (to a degree).
- A mainstay of the Marvel Universe, where everything from Spider-Man's radioactive spider bite to the Fantastic Four's cosmic ray exposure can be inherited. Generally, it's revealed that the various doses of radiation did change their DNA, so the offspring of Freak Lab Accident Silver Agers can officially be called Mutants.
- Two Flashes—Wally West and Barry Allen—have had children, and in both cases the children have inherited the speed powers. It's a Speed Force thing, or something.
- Indeed, Barry Allen's grandson's half-brother also has speed powers, although neither of his parents ever did. Also, as the son of Captain Boomerang, he's inherited his father's knack for using boomerangs as offensive weapons.
- On the other hand, Owen and Bart's mother, Melodi Thawne, is a descendant of Barry's twin brother, Malcolm Thawne, as was Eobard Thawne, AKA Professor Zoom, which suggests that the Barry Allen bloodline has a genetic predisposition toward speed, rather than a Lamarkian outgrowth from Barry's.
- The Green Arrow's biological son, Connor Hawke, was every bit the bowman that his father is... but then again, so are adopted children Roy Harper and Mia Dearden, so this one seems to be an aversion. Live with Oliver Queen, you're gonna train with bows and arrows, I guess.
- Confirmed aversion. After getting a chemical mindwipe and being in a coma, in addition to not remembering his life, he is shown to be an abysmal shot with a bow, much to Ollie's dismay.
- Likewise, while Bruce Wayne's son Damien is a fierce hand-to-hand combatant, it's more because he's been trained since birth to become so... and Tim Drake, Bruce's adopted son, is better at it because he's trained more.
- Similarly Batgirl Cassandra Cain is the daughter of Lady Shiva and David Cain, the previous best hand to hand fighter in the world and one only a shade lower than Batman respectively. As a result she is the current best fighter. Her dad's Training From Hell played a large role, but she was one of many he tried to train. Genetics is heavily implied to be the reason it finally worked.
- That, or his finally having the chance to train someone up from early childhood.
- Subverted with Wildcat II, the son of Wildcat. Wildcat is a superb fighter with no other powers. His son isn't so great at it. On other hand, after the father spent a lifetime of dressing up in a cat suit, the son can turn into a werepanther. Lampshaded as when the father learns of it, he tells his son that he has some friends who can look into the reasons behind his transformation.
- As it turns out, his mother was a werepanther, too, so it's just an amusing coincidence that his power connected with his old man's gimmick.
- Scarlet and Sheena Hellpop inherited their father's fusionkasting powers, even though his abilities were given him by the Merk, and were also periodically taken away.
- The Zenith series in 2000AD relied on this. The main strand of superhumans in the story were able to pass on their superpowers to their offspring. Their powers originated in a wartime experiment where pregnant women were injected with ergot alkaloids. The resulting children's superpowers were mentally derived, you see, and kicked in when the children hit puberty.
- The character Doomsday was created deliberately through a brutal process of Lamarckian evolution.
- Alternatively, given the vast number of mutations that occur within individual cells in the human body, the researchers could have simply been playing a genetic lottery each successive cloning generation.
- While the mutations in the Marvel Universe are pretty varied and strange although the parents may be totally normal looking, it is noticeable that the minor character mutants have very different children or even normal children with mutant siblings. However the children of main characters tend to inherit the full power of their parents, sometimes combined, more rarely with even extra powers of their own.
- Cable has the telekinetic and telepathy powers of his mother, except stronger (or would be, if not for the techno-virus that he has to devote most of his power to keeping in check, as revealed by his alternate universe counterpart Nate Grey, who's rather godlike).
- All the offspring of Nightcrawler are blue skinned/furred, mostly with three fingers; most can climb walls, the direct powers vary.
- Neither this nor the Cable example really count, surely, given that we're talking about natural mutants here. If one accepts that the mutation Nightcrawler has gives him blue fur and three fingers with wall climbing ability, then there is no reason this mutation couldn't be passed on to children. It's wild, yes, and unlikely, but not Lamarckian.
- Rachel Summers even inherits the Phoenix force of her mother which has nothing to do with her genetics and technically there should only be one Phoenix at one time. Apparently the Phoenix (which is a sentient entity in its own right) just likes fusing with members of the Grey-Summers family.
- Completely averted with Graydon Creed, son of Sabertooth and Mystique. No powers whatsoever.
- Marvel character Scorpion (Carmilla Black) was designed based on the original plan that she was the daughter of Viper (Madame Hydra). To show she was Viper's daughter they gave her naturally green hair - which would only be possible if hair dye is hereditary.
- That said, her father is Bruce Banner and she doesn't seem to have gotten anything from him.
- Captain America received his powers (Physical attributes at the absolute peak of human perfection) from a shot of the Super Soldier Serum, which was first tested, as the government was likely to do, on black soldiers first. Of the initial test subjects, only Isiah Bradley survived, gaining the peak physicality, but becoming borderline mentally retarded. Bradley's grandson, Elijah Bradley, gets seriously injured when the Skrulls attack New York, and after a blood transfusion from his grandfather, gained the traits of Captain America.
- In the Ultimateverse, Cap's son inherits superpowers. The son, however, appears to better with them than Cap ever was, mostly because of training from a young age.
- Spider Girl probably counts, depending on quite what that radioactive spider did to her father's DNA; see the Heroes example below.
- Aside from peromone powers, Daken pretty much has all of his fathers powers.
Film
- In the movie version of A History Of Violence, Viggo Mortensen's character Tom Stall has the titular violent history along with wicked underhanded fighting skills. After his abilities are outed, his previously wimpy and mundane son (who had up to this point been in a healthy and loving environment, in which Tom preached self-control) develops fighting skills and a vindictive mean streak he uses on the local Jerk Jock, much to everyone's horror and surprise.
- Hardly an example, as the son uses none of the fighting techniques exhibited by his father, overcoming the bully through a combination of surprise and Unstoppable Rage. It's questionable whether the boy would have won in a rematch.
- Likewise, in August Rush, the titular character is a musical prodigy whose biological parents were both musicians.
- OK, musical aptitude can be inherited. Not prodigy-level, but...
- Lampshaded in Sky High, with a lecture on superhero genetics given by the school nurse.
- In Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, soon after it is revealed that Indy is Mutt's biological father, Mutt suddenly displays miraculous rope-swinging powers which pretty much surpass anything we've ever seen the old man do.
- He does swing every bit as well as the monkeys in the jungle around him...
- Played ridiculously straight in the Star Wars franchise: Jango Fett was chosen as the "template" for the clone army for his martial skills, which were somehow passed on to the clones through "genetic memory"; though they evidently still had to be trained, it's implied that the reflexes and such were already there. Also goes for Boba Fett, though he may actually have received some training from his father.
- Alternatively, this could just as easily be non-Lamarkian. Jango is a superb fighter due to training, experience, and presumably natural aptitude; his clones inherit the aptitudes, and receive (we presume) intensive training in these skills. Not surprisingly, they turn out to be very good fighters.
- This is specifically laid out to be the case in the Expanded Universe: in addition to being the genetic template for the clone army, Jango also designed their training regimen and even personally trained some of the elite commandos. And recruited other mercenaries, mostly fellow Mandalorians, to train the rest.
- Since Fett is a Mandalorian, and thus bred for war, he's a good choice for soldier stock. Which makes the stormtroopers' later incompetence even sadder.
- If you choose to go with the Star Wars Expanded Universe explanation, at some point between episodes III and IV, the Empire will gradually wean themselves off of clone troops and/or said clone troops will eventually die off, and they will convert over to a standard recruitment and training system. That certainly makes sense in the context of the original trilogy, as it is hard to imagine an elite stormtrooper bred from super soldier stock and genetically predisposed towards complete obedience and adherence to duty responding to a possible threat, "It's probably another drill".
- However, the Stormtroopers that attack the Tantive IV are, according to Battlefront II (which is delectably canon), the 501st Legion, "Vader's Fist". The 501st is a "pure" troop legion.
- Well they did rather well for stormtroopers including even capturing a hero in a group of three with only one loss which for a stormtrooper shows either extreme skills or extreme luck. They even won the battle on board.
- At least, until their Face Heel Turn and the Stormtrooper Effect kicks in...
- Which, again, is the same for Boba, given his somewhat embarrassing method of death. At least until the Expanded Universe retconned it.
- In Idiocracy Joe's suggested solution is to go back in time and encourage people to read books and stay in school. Even if those things do increase intelligence, they don't do so in a way that would be passed on genetically. He should have suggested encouraging people to have unprotected sex with smart people.
- Played horribly straight in the sequel The Legend of Zorro. Don Alejandro de la Vega's son, Joaquin, seems to have inherited his father's taste for social justice and swordfighting skills despite the fact that he has NO IDEA his father is actually Zorro.
- Somewhat related instance in Alien: Resurrection, where centuries after the third movie, scientists clone Ripley, complete with the parasite infecting her when she died. However, the failed clones make it evident that the Xenomorphs invade their hosts at a genetic level which was already implied in the last movie. Bonus points for the Xenomorphs' "genetic memory" which allows Ripley to remember her past life, though she does suffer from autism and other problems. Considering that the screenwriter was instructed to include Ripley's character in the film, this all comes off as remarkably plausible for a science fiction action movie.
Literature
- Harry Dresden in Dresden Files has a normal stage-magician father, while his mother was a powerful mage.
- Also, Molly Carpenter, from her mother's side. Her many siblings doesn't seem to inherit any magical powers, however.
- In Terry Pratchett's Discworld book Soul Music, Susan Sto Helit is Death's granddaughter, and has much of his power. The problem is, she's his granddaughter by adoption (on her mother's side. Her father was Death's apprentice. She also has a mark on her cheek that resembles the mark her father got when he was slapped by Death. Susan lampshades this by repeatedly pointing out genetics does not work that way. The series itself, meanwhile, has noted that on the Disc, not all heredity is genetic.
- Another good Discworld example would be Conina from Sourcery, daughter of Cohen the Barbarian who's frustrated by her constant urges to dress in skimpy animal skins and beat the crap out of everyone that looks at her the wrong way.
- The passing of skills along family lines is explained within the religious underpinnings of Nancy Farmer's The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm: The spirits of your ancestors actually hung around the family, and if they took a liking to a kid, they'd pass down their own skills. Hence, if little Jimmy winds up with unbelievable skills at piloting a fighter plane, it's not so much because he's genetically related to great-great-grand-uncle George (the ace fighter pilot), but because George's spirit stuck around after death, and kinda melded with Jimmy to grant him George's original powers.
- In the Shannara book series, the Ohmsford family begins to have innate magic starting with the children of Wil Ohmsford. Justified in-story: Wil's use of the magical elfstones was problematic, as he wasn't "elf" enough, and permanently left a trace of magic within him.
- In the novel {{2001: A Space Odyssey}}, the man-ape Moon-Watcher being made intelligent by the monolith is described thus: "The very atoms of his simple brain were being twisted into new patterns. If he survived, those patterns would become eternal, for his genes would pass them on to future generations." If the monolith wanted the patterns passed on, it should have been doing the twisting a bit lower down...
- Rudyard Kipling evidently believed in Lamarckian evolution. In "Kaa's Hunting" Mowgli is able to show the monkeys his skill at weaving sticks together because he is a woodcutter's son, while in "Red Dog" he cuts off the leading red dog's tail and then taunts him by telling him "There will now be many litters of little tailless red dogs, yea, with raw red stumps that sting when the sand is hot." (Since a wolf ends up killing him anyway this theory is never put to the test).
- And, of course, all of the ''Just So Stories'' are pure Lamarck. Well, except how the cow got his humph but that's another tale entirely.
- Tarzan's son inherited his father's highly trained strength, reflexes, and ability to understand animals (particularly apes).
- In Frankenstein Frankenstein destroys the "bride" he created for the monster because he fears what might happen if they reproduced. Realistically he needn't have worried, since the monsters are put together from pieces of normal humans, and so as a species would have been a dead end (any children they had would be normal humans). Of course, this was written in 1818, when nobody knew how inheritance actually worked, so it's pretty forgivable. Especially as there's no in-universe reason Frankenstein would know better.
- Nor is MISTER Frankenstein (he's a student, man, not a doctor! In the book, anyway) proven right; his creations never breed.
- And in Fred Saberhagen's The Frankenstein Papers, the greedy plantation-owners who'd been funding Frankenstein's research made the same mistake, believing that his creations would breed a new race of super-strong laborers to work as slaves on their Caribbean properties.
- It is only in the movies that Frankenstein creates his creation by stitching together parts of corpses and hitting them with lightning. In the novel the primary discipline he uses to make it is chemistry, suggesting that he actually grows his creature in a vat of (possibly electrically stimulated) chemicals.
- In Mike Resnick's Widowmaker series, the main character is the most lethal fighter in the galaxy but contracted a disease with no cure. He had himself frozen until a cure can be found but due to maintenance expenses, the doctors unfreeze him to make bounty hunter clones. The clones have his memories and skills but have subtle (sometimes) differences.
- In Agatha Christie's short story The Cretan Bull in her collection The Labors of Hercules, Hercule Poirot solves a mystery by determining that the character Colonel Frobisher was really the father of Hugh Chandler. He did this due to the biological fact that Hugh inherited Frobisher's habit of "drawing down his brows over his eyes and lowering his head, thrusting it forward, while those same shrewd little eyes studied you piercingly." No word which chromosome this habit comes from.
- Runs rampant in the 4th book of Twilight. Try not to think about it too hard.
- In the story Bisclavret from the Lais of Marie de France, a werewolf bites off a woman's nose and all of her descendants are born without noses because of that.
- Justified in the SF short story The Engineer and the Executioner, about a genetic experiment in a hollowed-out asteroid (which is actually called Lamarck), as the colony used in the experiment was actually designed to use Lamarckian evolution (which, in the story, turns out to be astonishingly rapid).
- In the sequel to Wicked, Son of a Witch, Elphaba's Pale Skinned Brunette son Liir gets some secret Intimate Healing from Candle, who becomes pregnant. After Liir's many misadventures she shows up just long enough to dump their green-skinned daughter on him. Apparently the Wizard's dye seeped into Elphaba's DNA/X chromosome...
- Oddly abused in Brandon Sanderson's Alcatraz vs the Evil Librarians YA novels, where superhuman powers, called "Talents," seem to come from having the last name "Smedry". Al's mother acquires the ability to "lose things" by marrying Mr. Smedry.
Live Action TV
- The Goa'uld in Stargate SG-1 are an entire species for which Lamarck Was Right. They even inherit memories. Since they are aliens with a very divergent reproductive cycle, human genetics doesn't apply.
- Less justifiable is that the child of two goa'uld hosts also inherits memories, despite being biologically human.
- The commercials for Birds Of Prey made a great deal out of the idea that the daughter of Batman and Catwoman would have inherited her father's drive to fight crime and her mother's drive to commit it. She also inherited cat-like abilities from her mother (who was a metahuman in the television show, despite her comic book Badass Normal characterization.)
- In Heroes, it was revealed that Nathan Petrelli and Nikki Sanders' powers were synthetic in nature. This didn't stop them from producing superpowered offspring.
- Of course, both of them had their children with other, naturally powered people. And one could assume their genes were modified to give them powers, which would allow them to pass on the modified genes.
- Only if their germline cells were altered as well as their somatic cells. It all depends on how it was done.
- Averted by Torchwood. Captain Jack's daughter Alice and grandson Steven did not inherit the immortality Rose granted him when she brought him back to life. And they were conceived well after he was made immortal. Consequently, Alice looks slightly older than her father.
- Used oddly in Psych where Gus insists that he can handle spicy (Indian) food because he's 1/4 Jamaican. His grandparent or parent may have cooked spicy Jamaican foods a lot, but it's not mentioned.
- Used in Charmed, where Wyatt Halliwell inherits both his mother's molecular freezing and combustion powers and his father's whitelighter abilities. Chris also receives whitelighter abilities, but has powers equivalent to Prue's.
- Not really, as a) Witches powers are genetically passed through families (two of the three original charmed powers were their mother and grandmother's respectively) and b) Leo was a once-human magical being, not a human with acquired powers.
Oral Tradition
- One Cherokee creation myth states that originally, all the world's deer lived in a single cave. When a boy who wanted to hunt them unsealed the cave, they all ran out. The boy quickly shot them all as they fled, but they survived and he only managed to hit them in their anuses, because they were running away. As a result, they lifted their tails up. Supposedly, this is why deer keep their tails pointed up to this day.
- A European folktale says that the reason dogs have wet noses is because the two dogs on Noah's Ark spent the Great Flood with their noses sticking out in the rain.
- There's similar tales on why bears have short tails (ice fishing with their tails, getting most of it bitten off by a pike) and why elephants have trunks (getting too close to a crocodile who grabbed it and ended up stretching it before the elephant managed to struggle free).
Tabletop RPG
- Tieflings in the 4th Edition of Dungeons And Dragons have managed to partially inherit a Deal With The Devil that their ancestors made as a racial trait.
- According to Draconomicon, dragons can pass on some of what they learn to their offspring. It's a handy way of ensuring they're Always Chaotic Evil.
- In keeping with Gothic fiction, powerful curses in the Ravenloft setting can be passed down from one generation to the next, deserved or not. This may say more about the Dark Powers' Jerk Ass tendencies than about Lamarckism, however.
- In GURPS 3rd Edition Steampunk sourcebook, optional rules are given if you want to play in a gameworld where Lamarckian evolution is correct, allowing high-skill parents to give exceptional talents to their offspring.
- The Dragonbloods in Exalted benefit greatly from Lamarck being right, as do some mortals to a lesser extent. It stands out as being one of the few settings to have a god of Lamarck being right: Parad, the Left Hand of Power and God of Inherited Might.
- This is shown by even having a background(merit trait) called "Breeding" which details the purity of blood and the elemental connection your parents possessed that you inherited.
- Probably most prominent in the case of the children of powerful celestial exalted, given that the celestial's exaltations themselves are completely non-hereditary.
- The Archeans, human-analogs from the Talislanta game, are descended from Beast Folk who'd used magic to eliminate their more animalistic traits. Justified in that, well, it's magic.
Video Games
- At the end of Assassins Creed, it is strongly implied that Desmond gains the abilities of his super-assassin ancestor Altair. Given that the game revolves around Desmond reliving the ancestral memories of Altair, the entire game is something of an embodiment of this trope.
- Plus, in an email you read, the guy they tested the machine on before they got to you went insane and began believing he was his old ancestor from 400 years ago. Then he scribbled blood on the walls.
- This is expanded upon in Assassin's Creed 2, where Desmond relives the memories of his ancestor Ezio to to compress several years worth of Assassin training needed to fight the Templars in a matter of days.
- Solid Snake of the Metal Gear series inherited, among other things, near-inhuman combat abilities and love of cardboard boxes from his "father" Big Boss. Metal Gear Solid even featured "Genome Soldiers" that were augmented by "gene therapy" with Big Boss's "soldier genes" in an effort to create elite soldiers without military training. It didn't work.
- Except for Johnny Sasaki, who lacks nanomachines to protect him from dysentery but otherwise functions well enough to fool other soldiers into thinking he's a part of the system that increases their combat efficiency. The fact that he later becomes half of a Battle Couple with his soon-to-be-wife is just icing on the cake, and the fact that he's this effective in combat despite everything would imply that he is, quite simply, the only successful Genome Soldier.
- Of course, the whole point of the ending of the game was that genes aren't everything. And for the record, it was Liquid with the superior genes, with Solid being the inferior copy, at least as Liquid understood genes. Word Of God is that Liquid isn't so good at genetics.
- Romancing Sa Ga 2 had a system of inheriting the previous Emperor's abilities.
- The point of breeding Pokemon (well, one of them). Wanna inherit daddy's Psybeam?
- The Ace Attorney series has this with Apollo, Trucy, and Thalassa, who evidently inherited Magnifi's ability to tell when people are tensing up in very subtle ways. They need a bracelet made of Applied Phlebotinum for its full effect, though.
- The Sonic The Hedgehog series' Chao (introduced in Sonic Adventure) work a little bit like this. Two Chao born as completely blank slates with randomized stat grades (indicating how well they're going to progress when that stat levels up) can raise their stats through work and even raise a stat's grade. If you breed them together, the child will inherit stat grades from one parent or the other and can inherit the improved grade rather than the original. Also its actual stats may be affected by its parents', I believe.
- In Fire Emblem Geneology of the Holy War (an untranslated Japan-only game for the SNES, which received an excellent Fan Translation... even if it isn't quite finished), the characters in the second generation (if their mother was paired up with someone) have their skills/stats/stat growths influenced by their parents. The Character Tiers take this into account.
- In the games (in general), it's normally said that only certain bloodlines can use certain weapons. Examples include: the Falchion (FE 3/Shadow Dragon); Aum Staff (FE 3/Shadow Dragon) and all of the holy weapons (Genealogy of the Holy War).
Web Comics
- Web prose series Star Harbor Nights has characters inheriting their parents' acquired as well as inborn mutations. Gleefully but obscurely Lampshaded by the name of a mutation-inducing drug, Lysenkol... named for Lysenko, a Soviet scientist who believed in the inheritance of acquired traits.
- Parodied in this strip of The Last Days Of FOXHOUND. The comic also has a lot of fun with its source material's love of this trope.
Web Original
- Something like this is going on in the Whateley Universe. Getting mutant powers is really really rare. But superheroes and supervillains seem to have insanely high odds of having kids with powers too. What, does using your powers a ton make them pop up in your kids?
- Superpowers are explicitly a combination of genetic and environmental factors, super heroics probably come under environmental.
- According to Word Of God, the 'mutant gene complex' is actually fairly common in the human population of Whateley Earth (about one in seven). It's that complex becoming active (usually at puberty) that's normally quite rare. Depending on how said complex gets passed on and what exactly triggers it, the chances of two 'live' mutants who by definition both have it in their DNA themselves producing more mutant offspring could thus plausibly be quite high. (Non-mutant supers, however, are on their own.)
Western Animation
- Subverted by Clone High, in which absolutely none of the clones have anything in common with their progenitors except for their appearance (and even that can be somewhat dubious; for instance, Cleopatra was not a beautiful native Egyptian). The only one who even vaguely resembles their progenitor is JFK, who acts like a caricature of the actual Kennedy, due to a combination of insecurity over his masculinity due to his gay foster parents, and his belief that that's how the actual JFK acted.
- Cleopatra was descended from Greek rulers and was not a native Egyptian.
- Danny Phantom had both the Fenton kids pick up their parents' skills in ghost fighting, especially Jazz. The father even noted it's "in their genetics".
- On the other hand, real fathers are known to say more or less the same thing when a child shows aptitude and/or interest in something a previous generation did, so it's less meaningful than you seem to think it is.
- And to make matters even more peculiar, Danny most resembles Vlad Masters, who never even dated the future Mrs. Fenton, when human. And then had an accident which gave him the same kind of supernatural powers Vlad has.
Real Life
- As mentioned above, recently, it's been discovered that some acquired changes can be inherited, albeit in a weaker, less permanent, and (probably) less important form. The study of this is called epigenetics. Basically, chemical changes to the DNA can help inactivate or activate parts of it — and because it's still DNA, these can be passed on. For instance, malnutrition might mean that your DNA doesn't methylate properly while you're growing up, and conditions in the womb can affect development of the fetus, which can pass on some information about the mother's environment — how much food is available, and so on—to the child. Science Marches On.
- Experiments in rats have shown that cross-fostered pups of mothers who exhibit attentive parental care (licking and grooming behaviors, in particular) end up, through the action of acetylation and methylation, having less of an "anxious" response to stressors. When these rats become mothers themselves, they exhibit the same sort of parental behavior towards their pups, so it is a continuing cycle — independent of genotype, the maternal attention is propagated to the next generation and so on.
- Bacteria can pass down traits acquired through horizontal gene transfer. When two bacteria swap genes or "mate", the exchange is permanent and the altered genome carries on to all offspring.
- In the late 1800s, there were several experiments to test Lamarck's theories, including one carried out in Germany that involved cutting off mice's tails to see if their children would be born with shorter, or no, tails.
- As Isaac Asimov (or Carl Sagan?) has pointed out: Jewish boys have been circumcised for many generations, but still every Jewish boy is born with a foreskin.
- Some genetic diseases like Myotonic Dystrophy are subject to "Anticipation". This means that if one or the two parents show a slight variant of the disease, the children will not only inherit the disease, but often suffer a harsher and earlier form of it, and this will only increase with each new generation. The reason is that the disease is caused by having more than a determined number of repetitions of a certain gene sequence and since 1) everybody suffers mutations during its life (though they rarely have any effect or show up at all) and 2) repetitions are among the most common mutations, people with more repetitions are more likely to gain even more, and thus to pass a larger sequence to their descendants to begin with. It has been discovered recently that other diseases are also linked to repeated sequences (such as Fragile X Syndrome, Kennedy's Disease and Huntington's Chorea) and as result these might be subject to anticipation as well.
- Anticipation is completely and utterly non-Lamarckian. The conditions subject to anticipation are congenital, although some of them (particularly Huntington's Disease) do only show up later in life, due to, for example, being caused by a gradual accumulation of a harmful protein (HD). When the reproductive cells divide (to make sperm or eggs), there is a high chance that the genetic code repeats which cause these conditions will expand due to the replication apparatus 'slipping' or 'stuttering' on the repetitive areas (it's more complex than that, of course, but most of the readers don't have genetics degrees...). The reason these conditions can become worse down the generations is not due to any acquired factors from the parent's life, it's because there are problems with the creation of their gametes. Some conditions commonly showing anticipation effects are Huntington's Disease, Fragile X Syndrome and Myotonic Dystrophy.
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