offspring

Offspring are the new individuals produced by reproduction, the children of a plant, animal, or any organism. They are the destination of heredity: the generation that receives genetic material from its parents and carries the family's genes forward into the future.

In sexual reproduction, each offspring inherits a mixture of genes from two parents, receiving one copy of most genes from each. This blending, together with the reshuffling of genes that happens when reproductive cells form, ensures that offspring resemble their parents yet are never exact copies of either.

The study of offspring is central to genetics because patterns of inheritance reveal themselves in the next generation. By counting how many offspring of a cross show each trait, geneticists since Mendel have deduced the hidden rules linking parental genotypes to the traits their children display.

The term is deliberately broad. Offspring may be a single seed, an entire litter, millions of bacterial daughter cells, or one human child; the word covers any progeny of reproduction. In asexual organisms, offspring are near-identical genetic copies of a single parent rather than a blend of two.