Paul Levitz varied his terminology, picking up what looked more or less scientific to explain many Legion powers and phenomena. He admitted in the letter column, shortly after he'd had Mon-el bring a white dwarf star to Legion HQ, that scientific accuracy was not his long suit.
Genetic engineering, as a concept, made it into the various "Who's Who" series ("in the DCU," "in the LSH") as a general explanation for Starhavenite abilities. Before that, it was variously called being an accidental "mutant," in Dawnstar's debut and origin stories, or having had "inbreeding."
Neither of these suggest a guided process of controlling the genome. That had been a part of biology since the early 1970s (far earlier for plant hybrids), but had not made it into popular culture yet. All that existed were random mutations or unwanted combinations. Levitz took the descriptive terms he could readily find.
With many mechanisms now in use for transferring genes or recombining traits, with genomes mapped for several species (including much of that for humans), it's already a conscious process. I'd expect that to continue to grow, in complexity, at its nearly exponential pace of recent decades.
Other allusions to Starhavenites suggested that the general population, after about 700 years as a colony, would have received wings. Again, this is suggested more by, say, "LSH" v2 n311's portrait of Starhaven than by the early Dawnstar stories, which depicted her father as not having wings.
Dawny was said to have received her intense and wide-ranging tracking skills through special genetic manipulation, though this was kept vague.
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