Nick is a former colleague, and I’ve co-authored one of the relevant papers with Isabelle, and with the greatest respect to the two of them I need to caution anybody against taking away the wrong message from this misleading article: these findings are fundamentally not translatable to humans — and even in most cases to mammals, research in mice notwithstanding.

Furthermore, most, if not all, transgenerational effects of epigenetic inheritance even in C. elegans is transient. Meaning, the effect attenuates over just a few generations and then vanishes completely.

To be absolutely clear: Learning is not inherited in humans. There are good reasons to make this a categorical statement. What’s called “learning” in C. elegans is completely different from “learning” in humans, and adaptive changes in mouse behaviour are, so far, still not clearly demonstrated to be caused by epigenetics, and there are good reasons to be sceptical, as summarised by Kevin Mitchell: http://www.wiringthebrain.com/2013/01/the-trouble-with-epige..., and by Bernhard Horsthemke: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05445-5

No mention of Dr. Sheldrake's work on the matter, pity. I wonder whether his work will be considered mainstream in my lifetime.

East Asian men are known to add belly fat. This is a cause for concern because it raises risk for cardiovascular diseases. It is said that this is happening because of famines causing cells to store more fat so that the human can survive no-food scenarios. Is this epi generics? Is it really true?

Totally random. I was thinking of this exact scenario on the way to work today. Not my field, just thought that there seemed to be a growing body of evidence that parental environment was having significant effects on offspring and this further scenario seemed some what logic.

Learning, usually depicted as some tedious process, may in reality result to just some one simple bifurcation triggered by some environmental properties, which of course can be encoded in DNA, why not.

How do wasps learn how to build those honeycomb structures that make up their nests. If a wasp is brought up in isolation and is able to do this, clearly its inherited.

I've seen domestic cats getting repelled by any object looking like a snake if you bring it sufficiently close to it and that too suddenly.

I'm sure there's lots of research being done in these areas but I was always bothered by how behaviors are learned or just instinct. What the hell is instinct? A priori knowledge or just selected, random hard-wiring? I hope we make some progress during my lifetime and start scratching surfaces of these mechanisms. I just hope it doesn't turn out to be via gut microbes--I want it to be digitally encoded.