Nel 2013 David Correia, professore associato di America Studies alla University of New Mexico, pubblicava su Capitalism Nature Societies un duro editoriale, dai toni risentiti e sprezzanti circa il suo Armi, acciaio e malattie o il più recente Il mondo fino a ieri. Veniva messo alla berlina il suo determinismo geografico, approccio che ha suscitato perplessità e critiche.

Jared Diamond is back at it, once again trading in the familiar determinist tropes that earned him a Pulitzer Prize for his 1999 book Guns, Germs and Steel. That dull book was chockfull of the bad and the worse, the random and the racist. At best it is just silly, as when he offers unsupported, and unsupportable, assertions such as his get-off-my-lawn grouse that children today are not as smart as in the recent past and television is to blame. At worst, it develops an argument about human inequality based on a determinist logic that reduces social relations such as poverty, state violence, and persistent social domination, to inexorable outcomes of geography and environment.

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