Of course, you could say: how dare you, how would you even know, ... I work in this field, the p-hacking, harking (hypothesizing after the results are known) is both pervasive and endemic. they massaged the factors, the genders, the ethnicity, the socioeconomic status etc until the model did something that was publishable.
It simply not possible to accurately correlate these two measures: self-reported minutes of touching a baby with the methylation levels of the DNA of that baby - if you are serious about accounting for all the possible variations across all factors
