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[Viking]

That title sounds weird but what I want to ask is, do traits pass on from generation to generation? More specifically, if a dwarf is disease resistant are his children more likely to be? Even pushing the question deeper: if I have a fort that gets hit by waves of syndromes or other diseases would the offspring of the survivors and those who resist the afflictions be more resilient than the average dwarf?

[Malecus]

I believe they are to some degree, but I have not conducted any !!SCIENCE!! on such a thing.  My only 'evidence' I have to support this is noticing that children inherit their parents religious views and degrees (resulting in children with multiple entries for worshipping a single deity because they are both an ardent worshipper and a dubious worshipper) and animals taking some traits such as size and colouration from their parents.  It would be good to test this sort of thing out and see if children get their parents initial traits or their traits at the time of conception (genetic vs Lamarckian evolution).  If it's the latter, we could start tolerating babies as we try various experiments.

[Noobazzah]

Well, as far as I know, dogs for instance do inherit traits from their parents (or it seems so to me). My starting dogs were "very muscular" and so are their offspring, while some dog's I've bought from caravans aren't. So I'd guess that some traits are inheritable, and if hogh disease resistance is such a trait, then you'd certainly end up with a more resistand population. But I don't know for sure.

[lcy03406]

In my fort there are 120 dwarves in total. I picked 30 soldiers on all physical attributes and will power above 1000.  Some families have more than one soldiers. But these families do have weak children. I know these because when I killed some weak children, there were more angry soldiers than I expected.

[quarague]

I think people also observed genetic development with very long world generations. If you start a fort in a world that is say more then a 1000 years old, most dwarfs will have very similar traits, say all blue-eyed, longhaired and overweight or something like that. I think it is also possible to breed for traits, so if you are patient enough you could get all your dogs to be huge and muscular, it will just take a couple of generations (and you need to kill of the weak small ones so they don't reproduce and contaminate your genetic pool).

[GreatWyrmGold]

This is true. About the genetic similarity long-term: The way I understand it, after a while the dwarves with, say, brown eyes or short hair, die by random chance before having kids while blue-eyed or long-haired dwarves have more kids and die less. Eventually, this trait becomes the norm.

[NedeN]

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=111624.0;topicseen

I havent looked through the entire thread, only a couple of pages. Its worth it to skim through, im sure.

[Viking]

Thanks so much for the replies! That link is terribly interesting and totally makes me want to systematically cull all my weak dogs out of the pack lol.