Takver, thanks for the link.
I very much agree with you and found it very hard to follow Wade's arguments as ultimately they don't appear to contradict in anyway the reasoning or conclusions of Jared Diamond. Yet he seems very keen to make it sound like he does.
I'm sure for instance that Diamond agrees with every word about Aborigines:
Consider Diamond's discussion of the Australian Aborigines in Guns, Germs and Steel. In accounting for their simple material culture, their failure to develop writing or agriculture, he laudably rejects notions of race, noting that there is no correlation between intelligence and technological prowess. Yet in seeking ecological and climatic explanations for the development of their way of life, he is as certain of their essential primitiveness as were the early European settlers who remained unconvinced that Aborigines were human beings. The thought that the hundreds of distinct tribes of Australia might simply represent different ways of being, embodying the consequences of unique sets of intellectual and spiritual choices, does not seem to have occurred to him.
I'm sure it has occurred to him and I am equally sure he concurs completely.
It is simply not relevant to the question of which "species" of society "evolve" to be "fittest" in a globally connected world.
It is at points almost as though he is denying the existence of evolution.
I suppose, therefore, I will just have to read The World Until Yesterday myself.