the.com/heredity

means The biological handing-down of traits from parents to offspring through genes, and more loosely, anything inherited — habits, diseases, that nose — passed through a family line.

from From French hérédité, from Latin hereditas meaning 'heirship' or 'inheritance,' itself from heres, 'heir.' The word originally lived in the world of law and property — who gets grandpa's land — before 19th-century biology borrowed it to describe who gets grandpa's chin. The legal sense of 'passing down what's owed to you' simply migrated into the body.