@SmashTheState Oh, not just drosophila. They’s shown epigenetics can cause huge changes, there’s a great study on mice where researchers implanted a gene that turned coats yellow (and apparently mess with metabolism) with a epigenetic trigger, and shown an obvious and marked change in phenotype from mothers with different diets. I can probably find the paper if you’d like. My lab is actually doing some epigenetic work and it’s come up recently.
Annnyway, yes, that’s a perfectly viable issue here, but since working knowledge on epigenetics is so tiny, I feel it’s worth discounting right now. Not because it doesn’t have an effect, because it obviously does, but because we have such a poor understanding of it that it would be virtually impossible for us to make heads or tales of this particular case.
Also, epigenetic studies show that the influence can easily be from far before pregnancy, even back several generations. So.. yeah. Fascinating, but insanely complicated.
Interesting note, though. Smoking is even worse then we already knew! It’s shown a negative correlation with standardized testing for children of smokers who smoked before pregnancy, regardless of during.