> Well, that's not quite true. The first half of the article is about effects of stress during gestation.
Quoting from the article, the researcher starts looking due to the presumed effects of stress during gestation:
> Finding low cortisol in the 9/11 babies back in 2002 had told us that we'd been thinking about some things all wrong. We'd assumed all along that trauma was behaviorally transmitted: Joseph's problems seemed to result from the stressful, bereaved atmosphere in his childhood home. But now it looked like the uterine environment also played a role. So did the sex of the traumatized parent.
However, ultimately, the key discovery of the article is actually about epigenetic causes and not due to the (current) mother’s uterine environment:
> In 2020 we reported lower levels of FKBP5 methylation in the adult children whose mothers—and not fathers—were exposed to the Holocaust during childhood. This effect was independent of whether the mother had PTSD or not. It suggested that trauma might have affected the mothers' eggs decades before her children were conceived, while she was herself a child.
I agree with you that you can’t rule out environmental effects without a trial that controls for the effects of the current environment. However, the featured article is really about the hereditary effects, ostensibly epigenetic in nature, rather than nonhereditary.
Quoting from the article, the researcher starts looking due to the presumed effects of stress during gestation:
> Finding low cortisol in the 9/11 babies back in 2002 had told us that we'd been thinking about some things all wrong. We'd assumed all along that trauma was behaviorally transmitted: Joseph's problems seemed to result from the stressful, bereaved atmosphere in his childhood home. But now it looked like the uterine environment also played a role. So did the sex of the traumatized parent.
However, ultimately, the key discovery of the article is actually about epigenetic causes and not due to the (current) mother’s uterine environment:
> In 2020 we reported lower levels of FKBP5 methylation in the adult children whose mothers—and not fathers—were exposed to the Holocaust during childhood. This effect was independent of whether the mother had PTSD or not. It suggested that trauma might have affected the mothers' eggs decades before her children were conceived, while she was herself a child.
I agree with you that you can’t rule out environmental effects without a trial that controls for the effects of the current environment. However, the featured article is really about the hereditary effects, ostensibly epigenetic in nature, rather than nonhereditary.