Even as a lay reader (though I have read many other books and The Great Courses on similar material) there were several things I picked up on that are not scholarly at all. The most visible of which is the weird obsession the author has with repeatedly making sure that the reader knows that Europeans are not smarter than anybody else (though explicitly are less smart than Polynesians, an ironic contradiction to the author's own contention just a couple sentences prior that there are no intelligent differences among humans) and that any consideration whatsoever that different societies might have been different and made different choices with different outcomes, is utterly racist and unacceptable. It definitely struck me as very anti-science.
But taken as a whole I enjoyed much about the book's approach and there are plenty of great things in there. And I would say about any book, definitely don't take anything as gospel. Always, always, read the criticisms and other discussions before just accepting things as "correct" simply because they were printed in a book.
https://phys.org/news/2024-02-eurasia-dominant-east-west-axi...
https://massivesci.com/articles/chaos-in-the-brickyard-comic...
Related: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674088160
Jared Diamond tried to reclaim environmental determinism from its unsavoury origins, but he didn't realise that you couldn't repair something when the foundations were rotten.
https://blog.daviskedrosky.com/p/jared-diamond-a-reply-to-hi...
I definitely have criticisms of my own, such as the author being obsessed with telling the reader directly that Europeans aren't smarter (in fact he makes clear multiple times that Polynesians are genetically smarter than Europeans), and with him calling everyone and everything racist if they even consider the possibility that differences between groups of humans could have had anything to do with how their histories turned out, even directly calling any of those theories "racist." He also freely mixes his own opinion with facts, although he did usually make an attempt to include some of the counter-arguments, though they smelled a bit like strawmen.
But overall the book's attempt at comprehensive, engaging overview and the focus around what seems like such a simple question ("Yali's question"), and a lot of mostly accurate stuff, made for an enjoyable read and one I would recommend.
It's pseudo-science, designed to let complacent readers validate their prejudices, and pat themselves on the back.
I have never understood this particular criticism of the work. It is, if anything, an extremely strident argument against prejudice. The entire point is that differences in current day development are not due to innate deficiencies in the people but rather at least in part due to historical quirks of geography and ecology and therefore current development level says very close to nothing about the intrinsic potential or capabilities of anyone from any region of the world.
It turns out that there are lots of readers out there who wilfully confuse "is" for "ought". Even when an author goes out of their way to emphasise that they are only describing their view of reality, not in any way assigning virtue to it.
Then there's some very few left-wing critics who hate it for basically the same reason, but with opposite sign, since it implicitly also rejects that western civilization or the white race is uniquely evil.
Then there's some grumbling from academics who hate a popularizer for all the reasons you'd expect.
Not at all.
It actually plays into one of the most popular prejudices in the west.
Here's how you know if you have that prejudice. Do you think "I'm not like those people."