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Spotlight Reviews are decidedly wrong Christopher Smith is incorrect in his description of Diamond's work. First, Diamond does NOT reject the influence of culture and human decisions on the fates of societies. This is discussed at length in the Epilogue. Second, and worse, is that clearly Smith either did not read the book carefully, or perhaps is overlaying his own preconceived notions on Diamond's theses. To wit, the example quoted regarding Sowell's work misses Diamond's point completely: trying to determine ultimate causes, not proximate ones. Why did the Europeans have interesting technology and ideas to exchange with each other in the first place? Simply put, you need an agrarian society with sufficient food surplus to promote specialization. Without that the mere presence of rivers is not magically going to result in technological innovation - and there are enough river systems in the Americas, for example, to counter such a hypothesis. Diamond's thesis might seem simplistic to some - to this reader, a scientist by persuasion, on the contrary it is a relief to finally see Occam's Razor being wielded with such precision on a topic much muddied by the social "scientists". The objections raised regarding "other factors" sound similar to those always raised whenever a clean, self-contained and coherent scientific theory has been presented - and not surprisingly it is usually the non-scientists who tend to disagree with such theories, pecking away at them with irrelevant "counter-examples". (Witness the whole evolution "controversy".) What is perhaps most surprising about the negative reviews is the claim that Diamond's book is discounting the achievements of European civilisations - this misses the whole raison d'etre for the book: Why did European societies become and achieve what they did? What was the ULTIMATE cause since at one point in time clearly no particular group had much of an intrinsic advantage over the other? One explanation of course is genetics which seems to becoming more and more laughable as most of the West's universities, research institutes, and tech companies are being more and more manned by non-whites. (Maybe all the Chinese, Indians and other groups mutated in the last 30 years?) My suggestion to readers reading these reviews is simple: keep asking WHY? For each of the putative refutations of Diamond's book, the question "but why?" can be rather illuminating. That is precisely what this book does.