If you took a planet and a handful of genes, you could pose some great
questions about human nature and then run experiments to answer them.
Instead of asking how much altruism, cooperation, creativity, or any
other human trait is hard-wired, you could adjust the wiring yourself.
First, you would work out how tightly behaviors and abilities could be
programmed into the genome. Then you would create many societies with
starkly different predispositions and compare their progress. In one
country… Slate.
