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| - In The Golden Age of Comic Books, there were well established ways for a character to gain his or her 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, being disgustingly wealthy, 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.
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| - In The Golden Age of Comic Books, there were well established ways for a character to gain his or her 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, being disgustingly wealthy, 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. 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. 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. This trope is named for Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, a French naturalist whose theories (of which we call Lamarckian evolution) inspired Charles 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. While this idea has become closely linked to Lamarck, it was not original to Lamarck, nor was it central to Lamarck's contribution to evolutionary theory. 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. Hank Green briefly explains the relatively new field of epigenetics in this YouTube video. A.k.a. Inheritance of Acquired Traits. See also Evolutionary Levels and Superpowerful Genetics. Compare In the Blood for the morality version. Generation Xerox is this trope Up to Eleven; the kids inherit more than just their parent's physical traits. Sub-Trope of All Theories Are True. Muggle Born of Mages is the Subversion. Randomly-Gifted is an Aversion. Examples of Lamarck Was Right include:
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