Genetic engineering

A pre-historical technique whereby scientists believed that making fundamental changes to a planet's environment would somehow change people's physical form towards the kind of species that could naturally have been created in such an environment. For example, reducing the oxygen content of the atmosphere would cause everyone to either grow larger lungs, or die.

While this clearly works (take, for example, the Kreeger physique), modern science feels that deliberately changing a race's generic attributes would be too unpredictable to be worth risking, especially as this probably only works with communities the size of a planet or larger.

Etymology

The word is believed to have originally been generic engineering, in that it changes the most generic, or vaguely defined, aspects of a race.