It can explain ANYTHING, which means it explains nothing.

http://www.biostars.org/p/80196/ Why Does Biostar Cover Questions on Epigenetics, but not Intelligent Design?

If you have been concerned epidemiology is interested in becoming anthropology, this book won't make you feel better. It is anecdotes and correlation; an analysis of twins compared to survey results of parents may mean the mother's diet predisposed you to obesity.

It can't be legacy thinking like genetics because the 30 genes related to obesity, even when combined, only account for 2% of obesity.

Of course, this thinking has its downsides. If epigenetics is the culprit, tobacco companies are off the hook - they are going to be asking for the biggest refund ever from the American people because smoking does not cause cancer; their evidence will be the same as the correlations used in epigenetic analyses of twins; if only 10% of smokers get lung cancer and half of lung cancer cases were not smokers, then smoking is not the cause.  You can no more blame lung cancer on smoking than you can blame obesity on a spoon.

Epigenetics can do anything. The problem with that thinking is it's a little too pat. When something claims to be everything, it ends up being meaningless because it is misused. If your mom's diet made you fat, did her voting Democrat make you a Democrat? Epigenetic claims have been used to rationalize just that sort of thinking.

There is no choice, it is epigenetic determinism, the 19th century is back to haunt us for the 21st.

Now, there are upsides to this. I always believed that a few smug biologists had managed to give Lamarck a really bad rap. Epigenetics, in the hands of epidemiologists at least, say he was right. The Dutch are tall and a blacksmith will have a child with big forearms because of epigenetics.

He seems to have a bit of a beef with doctors and biologists, writing early on about the medical community that "Extraordinarily, most doctors and health professionals (unlike the general public, or at least the many cab-drivers that I meet are unaware of these rapid advances and the availability of genetic data."

Worth considering: doctors are not latching onto the miracle hypothesis of the week being made by social scientists. How would reading correlations about twins cure people today?

and about scientists, "Another widely held belief that bit the dust was that the only part of DNA containing genes was important. The remaining 98 percent of our DNA was thought to be worthless."

Now, Spector has to know far more biologists than me so my saying I have literally never had a biologist say something so dumb won't mean much. If I get a large enough dataset I can find a biologist who will believe in ghosts, alien abductions and I can even find an evolutionary biologist who denies evolution. But he repeatedly makes broad claims and writes them out to make the seem like silly old biology believes it and he has gleaned the truth.

and that modern biologists ignored Darwin's hints about acquired inheritance and believe that