5 Metaphors for heredity

Heredity, instead of being resemblance, was an effort toward resemblance thwarted by circumstances and environment.

Life is only motion, and heredity being a communicated motion, it happened that the cells in their multiplication from one another jostled one another, pressed one another, made room for themselves, putting forth, each one, the hereditary effort; so that if during this struggle the weaker cells succumbed, considerable disturbances took place, with the final result of organs totally different.

This heredity is a wall in which one can make as many windows as one pleases.

Heredity," he mused in sombre mood, "is a force of such fatality in our lives....

Therefore one of the two: either the Rougon are sick, and in that case the cycle of novels about them is not a picture of French society during the Empireit is only a psychological studyor the whole physiological foundations, all this heredity on which the cycle is based, in a word Zola's whole doctrine, is nonsense.

5 Metaphors for  heredity