[bobviolier]

This article is specifically not just about "during pregnancy" though. Quote:

"It suggested that trauma might have affected the mothers' eggs decades before her children were conceived, while she was herself a child."

"They gave a male mouse a mild electric shock as it smelled a cherry blossom scent, stimulating a fear response to the odor. The response was accompanied by epigenetic changes in its brain and sperm. Intriguingly, the male offspring of the shocked mice demonstrated a similar fear of cherry blossoms—as well as epigenetic changes in their brain and sperm—without being exposed to the shock. These effects were passed down for two generations. In other words, the lesson the grandfather mouse learned, that the cherry blossom scent means danger, was transmitted to its son and grandson."

[lisper]

Yeah, I have to confess that I didn't get that far. I pretty much stopped here:

"The effect was most prominent in babies whose mothers had been in their third trimester on that fateful day."

At which point I thought, "OK, that's not surprising", wrote my comment, and went on to other things.

Frankly, I am extremely skeptical of the mouse results. I would be really surprised if this turned out to be reproducible. It's Lamarckian evolution, which has been long-discredited, which makes this an extraordinary claim which requires extraordinary evidence. By what possible mechanism could memory of a smell be recorded in a gamete's DNA?