When organisms have to adapt to their environment through physical alterations, how is that passed down to their offspring in the long run?
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It’s the other way around: genes (the genotype) determine, in the most part, physical characteristics (the fenotype).
Individuals, within a species, have genetic variation, because they’re different one from another. Individuals best adapted to their environment – often because of a genetic advantage translated to a physical advantage – tend to have more offspring, and more well-adapted, than the other individuals.
Fast-forward hundreds or thousands of generations. Those better-adapted descendants became the great majority, and the worse-adapted are going to be extinct. That’s a form of evolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_evolution
On the other hand, there’s epigenetics: heritable changes on fenotype that don’t require changes on genes, but in the genes’ activity and expression. More about it in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics
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