Exactly. I feel like this is asking the biologists a trick question. The correct answer is, "I don't fucking know. Are you offering me a grant to study this?"

Starting with a hypothesis doesn't require a detailed mechanism. Both questions posed in the article have a proposed mechanism - they clearly have a cause and proposed effect listed. This isn't the same thing as mining a giant generic database looking for arbitrary correlation.

The replication issue highlighted here is how choices in analytical approach can yield differing answers. This would be true even if you had a detailed proposed mechanism.

But neither one specified a falsifiable hypothesis. Which, to this layman's mind, means that any general statement made based upon the data is itself a hypothesis.