This evening I was standing around with some other parents, waiting for our 4-year-olds at their "school," when they marched in from the playground with their teacher. Catching sight of their own mom, or dad, they raced out from their single-file line and into the arms of a big person who looked a lot like them. There are ten kids, and I honestly think that if you had lined them up opposite the parents on the first day, before I"d witnessed this scene a single time, I could have gone at least 8-for-10 matching them up.
People have recognized since ancient times that offspring resemble their progenitors. Of course, they were all wrong about how exactly this worked. A close observer like Aristotle noticed that a person may resemble a distant relative more closely than a parent, and he developed the idea that heredity involved not the mechanical copying of traits but, rather, potentials and probabilities. We now know that was a pretty wonderful insight, but, still, he was way off on some things. He thought blood was the medium of transmission, for instance.
It's fashionable to bemoan the current sorry state of things. I sometimes consider, for example while watching C-Span, that in 1780 there were fewer than 3 million Americans and among them were Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton, Madison, John Adams, and George Washington. Nowadays a manifest popinjay like Paul Ryan is regarded with awe.
On the other hand, when President Adams's daughter had a mastectomy for her breast cancer, she was strapped to a table so that she couldn't move and given a stick to bite down on while the cutting was done. We've made considerable progress in science and its applications. Meanwhile, those most apt to wail about the decline of civilization are determined that creationism be taught in science class.
