Thursday, January 03, 2008

Generation

Generation (from the Greek γενεά), also known as reproduction, is the act of producing offspring. It can also refer to the act of creating something inanimate such as electrical creation or cryptographic scheme generation. A generation can also be a stage or degree in a sequence of natural descent as a grandfather, a father, and the father's son contain three generations.

A generation can refer to stages of consecutive improvement in the development of a technology such as the interior combustion engine, or successive iterations of products with planned obsolescence, such as video game consoles or mobile phones.
In biology, the development by which populations of organisms pass on advantageous traits from generation to generation is known evolution.

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