New Article: Our Genetic Constitution
Intentional design is replacing evolution as the main driver of genetic change in humans. To enhance the brain is to rewire the machinery that makes institutions possible.
This article by Tim Lantin was published on Palladium Magazine on May 11, 2025. It will feature in PALLADIUM 18: Biological Inheritance, our 2025 summer print edition. Subscribe now to receive your copy.
Fear and fascination surrounding human biological experimentation are not new. They trace back centuries, as captured in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, where the eponymous Victor Frankenstein laments over his creation that “I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.” Shelley’s cautionary tale of scientific ambition and creation without foresight resonates anew in the age of genetic engineering. The novel, often cited as the first work of science fiction, captures both the tension between hubris and progress and between what it means to be human and what it means to design one from scratch.
Hubris, fear of the Other, and the limits of human control are all themes from Frankenstein that echo across our cultural canon. Such stories, whether ancient or modern, orbit the same central motifs. They suggest that while technologies evolve, the dilemmas they surface remain tethered to the core architecture of the human mind. Beneath the shifting aesthetics of civilization, we encounter the same creature again and again: Homo sapiens, constrained by inherited dispositions, yearning to transcend them.
As biotechnology moves ever forward and becomes capable of altering these predispositions, both human nature and civilization’s rules that arose from attempts to curb the worst of it become subject to change. Cultural permission for these changes appears to be withheld by the old taboo that Thou shalt not play at God. Public backlash to controversial figures like He Jiankui, who created the first genetically engineered human babies, and Josie Zayner, who self-administered CRISPR edits to her own body, has fueled a widespread unease about the ethics and legitimacy of genetic intervention. In 2019, several prominent biologists called for a global moratorium on human germline editing.
In public discourse, genetic engineering, especially genetic engineering on humans, is often framed as “unnatural,” violating an illusory sense of purity in nature or disrupting a moral order presumed to be sacred. And yet, from a memetic perspective, civilizations that learn to wield this power responsibly may thrive, while those that abstain could stagnate. If kept under control, the ability to consciously reengineer human nature could become the defining advantage of future societies—yet to wield it wisely, we must first understand what human nature truly is.
Thanks to the rigorous work of behavioral geneticists, we have never been closer to a scientific understanding of the link between our genes and human nature. In a seminal paper published in 2016, Robert Plomin and colleagues distilled behavioral genetics research into ten key findings that have consistently replicated, a rare feat in the broader landscape of psychological science. Among the most striking is the discovery that the heritability—the proportion of variation in a trait within a population that can be attributed to genetic factors—of intelligence increases steadily from 41% in childhood, to 55% in adolescence, to 66% in young adulthood.
This finding indicates that genetic influence on higher-order cognition is robust and not fixed at birth but develops over time. Other traits influencing behavior, such as personality and susceptibility to mental health conditions, also show substantial genetic influence. While no psychological trait is entirely heritable, all are meaningfully shaped by genetic variation and typically governed by many genes of small effect.
Moreover, correlations between traits at the behavioral level are often mirrored at the genetic level. This suggests a shared biological architecture. External experiences are not trivial, but many of the environmental influences that matter most are individuated rather than collectively experienced. These findings challenge the traditional nature versus nurture dichotomy, suggesting instead that nurture frequently operates through the lens of nature—that is, our environments interact with and are filtered through our genetic predispositions.
Intelligence is unlikely to be the only such aspect of human individuality. Genetic influence on behavior is not marginal or easily overridden by effort or upbringing; it accounts for a substantial share of the variation in psychological traits, often surpassing the explanatory power of other factors in the social sciences. What emerges is a nuanced view of the human psyche and behavior, one shaped by a dynamic and ongoing interplay between genome and environment. Might the persistence of human nature be merely an artifact of the stability of the shared genetic constitution of man over the duration of recorded history?
Our Wetware Has Not Changed Much Lately
Since the emergence of Homo sapiens approximately 200,000 to 300,000 years ago, all members of our species have consistently shared approximately 99.9% of our DNA with each other. This figure refers to base pair similarities between aligned sequences of human genomes. The last 0.1% of variation represents the extent of both genetic diversity and evolutionary change in the history of our species.
We have since learned to manipulate our environment to favor our survival, and the entrenchment of pro-social norms like impulse control, reciprocity, and empathy for the weak has promoted survival for all but our sickest and poorest. Our constitution, in the sense of our physical and biological characteristics, amounts to an effective biological constitution in the sense of fundamental law. They channel our innate drives into building institutions that stabilize our species. In the absence of consequential pressure to modify human nature, is our species doomed to relive the same human dramas ad infinitum? Or can sufficiently advanced genetic engineering update our outdated wetware for a modern world and help write us some new stories and constitutions?
Our traditional idea of a timeless human nature is the byproduct of a relative lull in fundamental neurobiological change since we became an agrarian species. At the time that early humans first evolved, the human telos, or ultimate end, was not so different from that of other species in the animal kingdom. In the Paleolithic era, we possessed mechanistic drives to survive and reproduce—prerequisites for evolutionary success across all extant life. In other words, species that lacked innate drives for self-preservation and reproduction would have been outcompeted early in the history of life.
Homo sapiens, however, gained new neurobiological capacities for abstraction and coordinated action in service of shared goals. These traits gave us an edge over both predators and the environment, allowing us to convey stories, learn from non-immediate experience, and subordinate individual desires to collective imperatives. It was these advantages that stabilized our neurobiological substrate against fundamental change driven by selective pressures.
This cognitive leap did not happen all at once. Early in human evolution, particularly between about 2 million and 300,000 years ago, strong selective pressures acted on the brain—primarily driving increases in size and enabling complex tool use. As anatomically modern Homo sapiens emerged, selection pressure on the brain continued but became more nuanced, favoring traits like cognitive specialization, neural plasticity, and processing efficiency rather than sheer volume. However, by the dawn of agriculture, the greatest determinant of survival and reproduction shifted to childhood mortality.
High childhood mortality was a universal feature of human life until quite recently, shaping both ingrained behavior, such as increased parental investment and kin care, and cultural norms like the idealization of having many children and monogamous relations. For most of agrarian humanity, the most evolutionarily successful members were not our statesmen or nobility but simply those with the most robust immune systems and dedicated parental investment. Selective pressures again shifted at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and again when advances in sanitation, germ theory, vaccines, and biomedical understanding all but ended the overwhelming influence of childhood mortality and survival in human evolution. Indeed, childhood mortality began its decline in the early 1800s from the age-old average of 48% down to today’s rate of 2.5%. The influence of the reproductive component of selection pressure reached new heights and shifted decisively toward a complex blend of aesthetics, ideology, and lifestyle as components of mate choice. Still, there have not been enough generations to see the effects of these newer selection pressures fully play out in shaping our brains and behavior.
For most of natural history, evolution operated without regard for suffering, morality, or aspiration. But today, we stand at the threshold of a radically different paradigm—one in which adaptation can be intentionally designed and meaningfully applied to existing generations and at the level of the individual. The human species may no longer be bound to wait on the lottery of mutation and the brute force of environmental pressure to improve its condition. But as the power to direct our own evolution comes into view, we must also confront the psychological and historical burdens that shape our collective response to it.
Challenges On the Road to a Wiser Species
The hesitation runs deeper than abstract ethics. Much of the fear surrounding genetic engineering stems not from the science itself, but from cultural memory. The political associations of the 20th-century eugenics movement have left a lasting impression on the public imagination. Past atrocities, framed in the language of biology and improvement, have embedded a deep cultural resistance to any effort that seeks to modify the human species, no matter how well-intentioned or scientifically informed.
In recent years, however, American public opinion has shifted to a mixed view of gene-editing babies. The proportion of U.S. adults who support or condemn the widespread use of gene editing to greatly reduce a baby’s risk of developing serious diseases or conditions is about even. Public sentiment and regulation vary drastically across the world. Japan, Russia, Ukraine, and China are among the most permissive for gene editing in humans, according to the Global Gene Editing Regulation Tracker. By the same standard, the United States, along with New Zealand, India, and the European Union, are among the most tightly regulated. These differences in sentiment and regulation may lead to an acceleration in genetic engineering capabilities and prove consequential in today’s era of great power competition.
Yet, there are real failure modes for societies that experiment too quickly or recklessly with genetic engineering. Just as our ancestors enjoyed better social outcomes from normalizing increased parental investment and monogamy, today’s societies will benefit from crafting and enforcing social norms around human biological design. As we contemplate replacing evolution’s blind hand with our own, the question is not merely can we redesign our genetic makeup, but under what circumstances should we, and how do we ensure those designs are truly good. Freud’s concept of the “narcissism of small differences,” reminds us that even minor divergences, especially when aesthetic or value-based, can spark deep division. The risk of aesthetic or value lock-in is significant. A society that enshrines a narrow vision of intelligence, beauty, or temperament may sacrifice both biological and cultural diversity in the name of progress, along with the valuable sentiments that accompany them.
If genetic engineering proceeds based on flawed or overly reductive models, particularly those that conflate nurture with nature, we may unintentionally freeze social mobility or unleash unpredictable phenotypes. As genetic modification becomes more accessible, the traits we once treated as immutable may become malleable, even commodified. In such a world, identity could shift away from biology and ancestry and toward shared ideology and memetic alignment. But this transition is not without risk. Without ethical foresight and robust governance, a genetic diaspora could fracture the social fabric, entrench inequality, and perpetuate oppression in the name of enhancement. The challenge is not just technical. It is moral, philosophical, and civilizational.
Done responsibly, matured genetic engineering holds the potential to permanently raise the floor of our health, turning unequivocally devastating inherited diseases into a specter of the past. Applied to the human brain, it may expand the boundaries of cognitive and emotional experience, enhance memory, reasoning, empathy, and foresight, and raise the baseline of subjective well-being. These are not the traits of tyrants or ideologues; they are the psychological foundations of citizens that comprise stable, flourishing civilizations.
Rather than locking in rigid values, neural enhancement could enable societies to become more flexible and pluralistic by fostering the traits that allow people to improve coordination for the long term at multiple social scales–getting along with the family, resolving immediate issues at the neighborhood and city scales, and engaging across large cultural differences at the state and civilizational scales. Where evolution optimized for local survival, neural genetic engineering could optimize for a thriving future.
Unlike alignment with artificial intelligence, which risks alienating us from decision-making processes or misrepresenting human values altogether, neural self-enhancement preserves the continuity of human agency. The augmented individual remains legibly human, thoughts and goals anchored in human phenomenology, needs, and shared sense of personhood. In this light, enhancement is not a rupture, but an augmentation of human nature itself. If our biological constitutions emerge downstream from a combination of biological predispositions and external experience, then the deliberate refinement of our cognitive architecture may enable better forms of governance, better ethics, and better collective reasoning.
Traits like epistemic humility, impulse control, and compassion should not be moral luxuries. They are building blocks of coordination systems that scale. Engineering them into future generations could imbue societies with the kind of robust resilience necessary for adaptation in the face of accelerating complexity. It is not difficult to imagine the global challenges ahead—climate change, geopolitical instability, potential resource collapse—outpacing our inherited psychological toolkit. To meet the demands of the future without sacrificing the core of our humanity, we may need to upgrade the wetware through which the human becomes plastic.
Better Biological and Political Constitutions
Until now, biological evolution has moved far more slowly than the pace at which we design new systems of governance. But that balance is beginning to shift. In the age of genetic engineering, we are approaching a moment when evolution itself becomes a programmable substrate—no longer a force we passively endure, but a system we can actively shape. This opens the door to a more tightly coupled feedback loop between biology and governance, a concept closely related to Foucault’s biopolitics.
Social technologies ultimately emerged from the need to regulate our behavior, and how we act is partially downstream of our genome. Editing our biology should be considered a way to upgrade the civic mind—after all, our institutions are not external to us. They are cognitive scaffolds, extensions of human reasoning, memory, and moral judgment. And yet, for all its promise, this vision demands clarity and caution. If biological divergence between populations accelerates uncontrollably, or if enhancement proceeds without ethical constraint, we risk a kind of evolutionary myopia: the inability to see one another clearly, or even recognize each other as members of the same moral community. We already struggle to see eye to eye across cultural, ideological, and socioeconomic divides. What happens when we no longer share the same eyes, or even the same nervous systems by which we interpret the world?
Through careful, empirically grounded inquiry, behavioral geneticists are converging on a provocative insight: that human nature, often treated as timeless or unchangeable, is, at least in part, an emergent property of biology. If this is the case, then human nature is not fixed but editable. By altering the biological substrate from which our traits emerge, we may one day gain the ability to shape our cognitive and emotional dispositions with intention, breaking free from long-standing social tropes we once assumed were inevitable. The capacities for rational coordination, long-term planning, and empathy across differences are not merely cultural ideals; they are functions of neural wetware that are optimized for a bygone era in our long history as a species. Perhaps we have not yet built utopia because we have lacked the biological preconditions to derive it; better constitutions may beget better constitutions.
Tim Lantin is a first-year biomedical engineering PhD student studying neural control at Columbia University. You can follow him at @timlantin.