Though most prefer to provide counterevidence as a corrective, others have gotten fed up. American studies scholar David Correia published an essay about Diamond’s work called simply “F**k Jared Diamond.”3 Correia calls out Diamond’s “environmental determinism,” which leaves out the crucial political aspects of urban transformation. Meanwhile, anthropologists David Graeber and David Wingrow take issue with the way Diamond suggests that civilizations at their peak are always hierarchical, and that those hierarchies can only be dislodged by environmental catastrophe followed by a collapse.
