If you know a little bit about history involving dates and such, Diamond makes some hilarious boners. Like, getting the actual dates when plague hit the Indians

If you know a little bit about history involving dates and such, Diamond makes some hilarious boners. Like, getting the actual dates when plague hit the Indians wrong in a way that makes his theory kind of fall to shreds. Anthropologists don't think much of him either. Of course any historical theory of everything based on one factor is going to look silly if you read another. Most modern people haven't read Spengler or Brooks Adams or whatever the popular socialist books were in the 30s which attempt to explain everything. History, of course, is path dependent, and the correct perception is probably something like "stuff is like this by accident."