ABSTRACT
A full genealogy of the Western concept of generation might trace the idea to Greco-Roman theories of heredity, in which social reproduction was dependent on the quality of biological matter transmitted by successive parents through time, something like a character gene in our contemporary imaginary. In On the Generation of Animals, Aristotle (2004/350BCE) characterized and typologized different modes of reproduction (sexual, asexual, and spontaneous). He supposed that females contributed only undifferentiated mass to their offspring, while males contributed the specific characteristics that defined an individual. Although seemingly archaic, this idea that male input is responsible for character, generational continuity, and historical change persisted through a range of scientific regimes, continued, by analogy through the Enlightenment, and reared its head in 1960s research on “youth culture.”
