alt Hacker News> “This study shows that paternal exercise can confer benefits — enhanced endurance and metabolic health — to offspring,”
So good habits can be good for offspring.
> For instance, mouse fathers exposed to nicotine(opens a new tab) sire male pups with livers that are good at disarming not just nicotine but cocaine and other toxins as well.
So bad habits can be good for offspring.
> “We just don’t have really any understanding of how RNAs can do this, and that’s the hand-wavy part,”
It seems to me to all be the handwavy part. I'm happy to wait until the research is considerably further advanced, past the clickbait stage.
Replies
the section immediately after that you didn’t quote:
> evidence keeps piling up. Most recently, in November 2025, a comprehensive paper (opens a new tab) published in Cell Metabolism traced the downstream molecular effects of a father mouse’s exercise regimen on sperm microRNAs that target genes “critical for mitochondrial function and metabolic control” in a developing embryo. The researchers found many of those same RNAs overexpressed in the sperm of well-exercised human men.
https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(25)...
I agree. The example with Nicotine intake having a somewhat positive effect on the children feels too wild at the money. Think of all the kids of the 60th and 70th. They must be immune to most toxins ;). Yes I take this example to the extreme. I also feel that this could maybe contradict what we learned from evolution theory. Why would it take so long for a given treat to establish itself. Maybe I mix too much into one bag after reading this one article.
Theres huge uncertainty and layered assumptions in all of microbiology and biochemistry about how exactly things work on small scale. Because it is really hard to study live reactions in little things you can just barely see on an electron microscope.
But yet humanity has managed to assert statistical truths about for example genetics and explain countless diseases, even cure and alleviate some. So even if you don’t have a theory on how exactly something works from the ground up, if you have statistical evidence, plenty of useful and practical advances can be built top-bottom and we have outcomes that validate this.
Not giving any opinion on this piece specifically but just saying there can be scientific value even if the details are hand-wavy.
Also “mouse models”.
The only purpose mouse models serve is to fill the popular press with sensational findings and torture a lot of mice.
I feel like the ghost of Lysenko is laughing at us.
although it's like milk too. exposure at an early age leads to the body producing more lactase enzyme to digest it. but lack of exposure often makes people lactose intolerant.
You took a left-turn:
Nicotine is on-par with caffeine in isolation.
It’s the rest of the crap in smokes and vapes to be concerned with.
I was surprised to learn nicotine is used by functional doctors to treat CFS-adjacent conditions, and the mechanisms therein.
If you ignore "good" and "bad" then it's just "traits can be passed through this mechanism" egg seems a lot more reasonable.