No one puts things so crudely today, but if we are serious about asking why the West rules we have to confront the possibility that Homo sapiens interbred with premodern peoples, and that Eastern populations remain biologically less advanced than Western. We will never be able to excavate copulating cavemen to see whether Homo sapiens merged their genes with Neanderthals in the West and with Peking Man in the East, but fortunately we do not need to, because we can observe the consequences of their trysts in our own bodies.
