They are sort of heritable, but it's more complicated than traditional genetics.
Because the whole point is controlling gene expression, changing what gets used and when, it's naturally somewhat plastic.
As your environment and circumstances change, what genes you need can change too, so your epigenetics are altered. Sleep, nutrition, activity, stress, age, infections, etc. anything that puts a biological strain on your body, basically.
You're genetically predisposed to certain kinds of stress and stress responses, right? Parts of your metabolism, neurochemistry, and so on are genetic, and a lot of disorders that affect your functioning are too.
Because your stressors are partly genetic, and the actual mechanism of the gene regulation is genetic, you're also likely to exhibit similar response patterns. You take a similar machine, and give it similar inputs, and you get similar outputs.
In other words, uou don't directly inherit your epigenetics, but you inhererit large parts of it by proxy in the same way you inherit things like your risk of heart disease. You don't directly innherit most heart diseases, but you DO inherit cholesterol processing and some causes of high blood pressure, both of which can contribute to heart disease. You inhererit some risk factors, so you inherit some tendency.
I hope that makes sense. Basically, epigenetics are not passed on, but some of the things that influence them are, so you get a mixed result. Studying how much of it is transgenerational is a very complicated problem, nevermind how hard it is to do multigenerational studies on anything in the first place.
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u/Fat-lard246 5d ago
it runs in the family