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As if this isn’t enough, Wade’s penultimate chapter, “The Rise of the West,” argues that natural selection similarly helped produce European societies that were open and innovative, which enabled them to “achieve a surprising degree of dominance in many spheres.”

It has been widely commented on that Chinese society has for at least 3000 years enforced conformity. Those who violated conformity, unless they were the extremely rare person able to overthrow the ruling dynasty and set up a new one, got whacked.

In fact, they were generally not only themselves whacked, but their extended families and in some cases all their friends and their extended families.

Extend that process over thousands of years and you have a tremendously Darwinian process of conformists being "the fittest."

Meanwhile in Europe for the last 1500 years, rebels and nonconformists were also often in peril from their rulers, but if they could just get across the border, which was generally not far off, they'd find refuge and often welcome from their ruler's enemies in neighboring states.

In China, there was usually no place to flee except into barbarian lands beyond the Empire.