Editing Guns, Germs, and Steel (section)

=== Criticism ===
The [[anthropology|anthropologist]] Jason Antrosio described ''Guns, Germs, and Steel'' as a form of "academic porn", writing, "Diamond's account makes all the factors of European domination a product of a distant and accidental history" and "has almost no role for human agency—the ability people have to make decisions and influence outcomes. Europeans become inadvertent, accidental conquerors. Natives succumb passively to their fate." He added, "Jared Diamond has done a huge disservice to the telling of human history. He has tremendously distorted the role of domestication and agriculture in that history. Unfortunately his story-telling abilities are so compelling that he has seduced a generation of college-educated readers."<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.livinganthropologically.com/archaeology/guns-germs-and-steel-jared-diamond/|title=''Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond: Against History''|website=Living Anthropologically|first=Jason|last=Antrosio|date=July 7, 2011|access-date=November 20, 2017|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171119045103/https://www.livinganthropologically.com/archaeology/guns-germs-and-steel-jared-diamond/|archive-date=November 19, 2017|url-status=live}}</ref>

In his last book, published in 2000, the anthropologist and geographer [[James Morris Blaut]] criticized ''Guns, Germs, and Steel'', among other reasons, for reviving the theory of environmental determinism, and described Diamond as an example of a modern [[Eurocentrism|Eurocentric]] historian.<ref name="Blaut2000EightEurocentricHistorians">{{cite book | last = James M. Blaut| title = Eight Eurocentric Historians |edition= August 10, 2000|page= 228 | publisher = The Guilford Press| isbn= 978-1-57230-591-5|year=2000|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ktn7LmLgc6oC|access-date=2008-08-05}}</ref> Blaut criticizes Diamond's loose use of the terms "Eurasia" and "innovative", which he believes misleads the reader into presuming that Western Europe is responsible for technological inventions that arose in the Middle East and Asia.<ref name="Blaut1999EnvironmentalismAndEurocentrism">{{cite journal | author = Blaut, J.M. | year = 1999 | title = Environmentalism and Eurocentrism | journal = The Geographical Review | volume = 89 | issue = 3 | pages = 391–408 | url = https://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&se=gglsc&d=5001894820 | archive-url = https://archive.today/20130111082249/http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&se=gglsc&d=5001894820 | url-status = dead | archive-date = January 11, 2013 | access-date = 2008-07-09 | doi = 10.2307/216157 | jstor = 216157 | bibcode = 1999GeoRv..89..391B }} [http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/Blaut/diamond.htm full text] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060619162600/http://www.columbia.edu/%7Elnp3/mydocs/Blaut/diamond.htm |date=June 19, 2006 }}</ref>

Anthropologist Kerim Friedman wrote, "While it is interesting and important to ask why technologies developed in some countries as opposed to others, I think it overlooks a fundamental issue: the inequality within countries as well as between them." Timothy Burke, an instructor in African history at [[Swarthmore College]] wrote: "Anthropologists and historians interested in non-Western societies and Western colonialism also get a bit uneasy with a big-picture explanation of world history that seems to cancel out or radically de-emphasize the importance of the many small differences and choices after 1500 whose effects many of us study carefully."<ref name="Jaschik" />

Economists [[Daron Acemoğlu]], [[Simon Johnson (economist)|Simon Johnson]] and [[James A. Robinson]] have written extensively about the effect of political institutions on the economic well-being of former European colonies. Their writing finds evidence that, when controlling for the effect of institutions, the income disparity between nations located at various distances from the equator disappears through the use of a two-stage least squares regression quasi-experiment using settler mortality as an instrumental variable. Their 2001 academic paper explicitly mentions and challenges the work of Diamond,<ref>{{Cite journal|last1=Acemoglu|first1=Daron|last2=Johnson|first2=Simon|last3=Robinson|first3=James A.|date=December 2001|title=The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation|journal=American Economic Review|language=en|volume=91|issue=5|pages=1369–1401|doi=10.1257/aer.91.5.1369|issn=0002-8282|doi-access=free}}</ref> and this critique is brought up again in Acemoğlu and Robinson's 2012 book ''[[Why Nations Fail]]''.<ref>{{Cite web|title=Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson: 9780307719225 {{!}} PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books|url=https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/205014/why-nations-fail-by-daron-acemoglu-and-james-a-robinson/|access-date=2021-06-21|website=PenguinRandomhouse.com|language=en-US}}</ref>

The book ''[[Questioning Collapse]]'' (Cambridge University Press, 2010) is a collection of essays by fifteen archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, and historians criticizing various aspects of Diamond's books ''[[Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed]]'' and ''Guns, Germs and Steel''.<ref>{{Cite journal|url = https://www.academia.edu/1145682|title = Review: Questioning Collapse|last = Flexner|first = James L.|date = December 2011|journal = Pacific Affairs|issue = 4|volume = 84}}</ref> The book was a result of 2006 meeting of the [[American Anthropological Association]] in response to the misinformation they felt Diamond's popular science publications were causing and the association decided to combine experts from multiple fields of research to cover the claims made in Diamond's and debunk them. The book includes research from indigenous peoples of the societies Diamond discussed as collapsed and also vignettes of living examples of those communities, in order to showcase the main theme of the book on how societies are resilient and change into new forms over time, rather than collapsing.<ref name="Bergstrom">{{cite journal |last1=Bergstrom |first1=Ryan D. |date=July 8, 2010 |title=Book Reviews: Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire |url=https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08873631.2010.490663 |journal=[[Journal of Cultural Geography]] |volume=27 |issue=2 |pages=237–238 |doi=10.1080/08873631.2010.490663 |s2cid=144705802 |access-date=September 2, 2022}}</ref><ref name="Wakild">{{cite journal |last1=Wakild |first1=Emily |date=June 2011 |title=Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire (review) |url=https://muse.jhu.edu/article/447566/summary |journal=[[Journal of World History]] |volume=22 |issue=2 |pages=355–359 |doi=10.1353/jwh.2011.0046 |s2cid=161172628 |access-date=September 3, 2022}}</ref>