Of course!
Virtually every trait has a genetic component. Traits such as temperament are contolled by many genes as well as environmental influences, so it's not a simple case of friendly parents will have friendly children and nasty parents will have nasty children - every time - but there is a very strong correlation. Incidentally, although this has been demonstrated in many species (including humans), the implications on political correctness etc tend to make the findings less well publicised.
Most animals don't clone themselves, so each individual is a randomly selected half of each parent, rearranged. This can give phenotypes anywhere between that of the parents and even substantially outside that range, but for many traits, temperament being a perfect example, there is a very strong correlation.
How else would you explain certain species having well known temperament trends? Red bellied black snakes and copper heads are well known for being very docile, eastern browns and slatey grey snakes are well known for being very nasty. If you breed these things, you'd expect the trend to continue, obviously. Okay, that may sound strange because they're different species, but the principle is exactly the same. Jungle carpets are well known for being nasty, Murray-Darling carpets are well known for being docile, again, that's genetic, quite clearly. Bash a snake over the head with a shovel every day and it will probably be nasty, no matter what its genetic makeup, gently handle a snake every now and again from the time it is born/hatches and it will likely be tame, even if it's a brown snake or jungle carpet, sure, but you can see that the genetic component is a strong and very important one. I cringe every time I see people say "temperament not important because it will be a breeder". If breeders don't care about temperament, but 'pet owners' with no intention of breeding do, we'll end up with a captive population filled with nasty snakes. It's really great to see some people putting an effort into selecting the very best snakes to breed from, and really bad when people just don't care. When you're selecting a breeder, it's not just a matter of choosing one snake, you're choosing what may be used to replicate dozens or hundreds of times; it's a very big responsibility.
We all know that everything resembles its parents. Unless the alleles (what most people call genes) controlling a trait are fixed, there is genetic variation affecting the trait. Typically, if this is the case, there is extremely little variation in the trait. Human body temperature is a good example (because it is well understood and the phenotype is familiar to us). (Basically speaking) We all have the same genetic makeup controlling our body temperatures, and our body temperatures vary very little from one another. The miniscule differences, (with few exceptions, they're not measurable or identifyable as they are completely lost in the normal fluctuations which occur withing individuals and would typically be immesurable, even if we sat for our whole lives at the flat mean temperature we would otherwise have had). Being something which geneticists well know to be highly governed by genetics across many species, temperament in snakes can be most definately said to have a strong genetic component. Over time, we will loose more and more genetic variation from our captive gene pools and so right now it is absolutely critical that we choose the very best of what we have to breed from, in terms of any trait we are interested in.
