> Handily dismissed by a hypothesis conceived in a moment with zero effort. Not at all. What I am saying is a standard criticism of overhyped epigenetics stud

> Handily dismissed by a hypothesis conceived in a moment with zero effort. Not at all. What I am saying is a standard criticism of overhyped epigenetics studies which follows from the lazy design which does not control for very large known confounds (pretty much all effects are smaller in a within-family comparison) or actually demonstrate it's not reverse causation, which as in OP results in such wild overhyping of causal implications. This is as much 'zero effort' as noting, of the latest nutrition study claiming that fat (or carbs, or red meat, or protein, or milk, or eggs, or...) will definitely kill you, that the methods simply do not work for what they are claimed to prove. If you find the criticisms tiresomely cliche & predictable, that's an indictment of the researchers or funders, not the criticisms. (I know I find it tiresome to point out the same problems every time and respond to comments shocked that correlation!=causation, or that most human traits are heritable, or that p-values mean nothing interesting, estimates are inflated by publication bias, one shouldn't control for intermediate variables, gains fade out etc. I suppose I do it out of stubborn perversity. I keep resolving not to get into arguments about these things, and keep failing.) It has been demonstrated many times that epigenetics are heritable, affected by gene-environment correlations, and are not themselves causal for many outcomes they have been claimed to be but passive indicators of environment; so OP is, at best, possible but not probable and the speculation that the epigenetics changes will have any causal effects later on to be taken with considerable skepticism... (as they are more likely to simply indicate the manifestation of the childrens' genes as inherited from their parents). Epigenetics is of tremendous biological interest as it is often how genetics exerts its effects, but unfortunately, that's not what people want epigenetics to be. You may remember the scientific reaction to Siddhartha Mukherjee's New Yorker article on epigenetics last year which similarly took likely-confounded & reverse causation epigenetics claims at face value.