[jcranmer]

The biggest issue with Diamond is that he's just wrong a lot of the time. This is especially so in Collapse, where virtually every single case study he talks about is something where consensus opinion is that environmental degradation played at best a minor role.

As for Guns, Germs, and Steel itself, it's not quite as bad as Collapse, but it does have issues. The underlying thesis--of geographical determinism--just doesn't hold up to actual evidence that well: there's not a lot of evidence for Neolithic technology spread in the east-west axis of Eurasia, especially in comparison to the rather prolific spread you see in the Americas. In particular, cereal crops: you see very little spread of cereal domesticants between Mesopotamia/Mediterranean and East Asia, while maize spreads from Mesoamerica well into both North and South America, supplanting indigenous crops in both places.

The deeper issue with GGS, for anthropologists in particular, is that it has an underlying presumption of a unilinear model of civilization--essentially, the idea that something like the tech tree in Civilization games is a good model of how technology works. In anthropology, this model is deeply discredited, as it performs extremely poorly, especially when you look at cultures that straddle chiefdom/state societies.

[leto_ii]

Thanks for the reply. Indeed I heard there was criticism of his Easter Island case in Collapse, but not that all the examples were wrong.