Generation

From Wikinfo

Generation, also known as procreation, is the act of producing offspring. It can also refer to the act of creating something inatimate (such as electrical generation or cryptographic code generation). A generation can also be a stage or degree in a succession of natural descent (e.g. - a grandfather, a father, and the father's son comprise three generations) or stages of successive improvement in the development of a technology, such as computers, automobiles, or microprocessors

A generation can also represent all the people born at about the same time, sometimes called a generational cohort (see demographics). Historians hold differing opinions regarding to what extent dividing history into generations is a useful analytical tool or an improper over-generalization.

William Strauss and Neil Howe, in their book Generations, list the generations of Anglo-America. Their definition of "generation" is given as: A cohort-group (all persons born in a limited span of consecutive years) whose length approximates the span of a phase of life (approximately 22 years) and whose boundaries are fixed by peer personality (a generational persona recognized and determined by common age location, common beliefs and behavior, and perceived membership in a common generation).

In biology, the process by which populations of organisms acquire and pass on novel traits from generation to generation is known as the theory of evolution.