The answer is probably a little bit of both...

I personally never found Jared Diamond's stuff intellectually lightweight, but the casting of such aspersions by cultural anthropologists seems intriguing: if an intellectual can't find a logical flaw in your argument, they attack the depth of your analysis. Then, your character. Then, probably your mother. In this case, it seems that Diamond's problem is that he's trying to explain a global, not regional or local phenomenon. Hence, the problem the cultural analysts seem to be having with him. At a confab near Dragoon Arizona, home of The Thing?, they appear to have tried to do a number on him.

“A big-picture man,” one participant called him. For anthropologists, who spend their lives reveling in minutiae — the specifics and contradictions of human culture — the words are not necessarily a compliment.“Everybody knows that the beauty of Diamond is that it’s simple,”  said Patricia A. McAnany,  an archaeologist at Boston University who organized the meeting with her colleague Norman Yoffee  of the University of Michigan. “It’s accessible intellectually without having to really turn the wattage up too much.”

The piece's author, George Johnson, is an award winning science writer. So, of course he gets a key fact wrong -- he accuses Diamond of being a geographer when in fact he's an evolutionary biologist. There is a difference between social science and real science, says the guy with some degrees in what amount to applied social science and social science. One concerns the use of data -- in social science, the data is often neither reproducible nor explicable without serious hidden agendas. So, while Diamond does teach geography at UCLA, he also teaches physiology. Which means, he has to be careful to offend either group, or else no one will want to sit with him at faculty symposiums, which could result in consuming too much sherry and a resulting embarrassing moment or two with a pretty graduate student from Illinois or something similar.

The cultural anthro's complaint appears to be that Diamond doesn't want to assign blame. Cultures have declined and fallen not due to any inherent flaw but due to the impact of western Civilization. Diamond points to other things; while the west may come by to give the culturally or socially bankrupt locals a push, they've already gone out on the limb and are busily sawing they're way through it. Their saw may be duller than the trifecta of plague, gunpowder or steel, but they'd get there eventually. If we were talking about a horde of cute little bunnies eaten by ravenous wolves, well, then the natural order might seem less threatening to them. However, there is no cultural or religious imperative that acts on history. In and on and through individuals, sure -- I refer you to The Jeremy Irons-Robert De Niro classic, The Mission to get an idea of how that turns out for those driven by the best of motives. . poorly. Moral high ground, but bloody, awful unbearable defeat.

I suspect that someone will take issue with this, and call me a bunch of names. Well, I deserve a lot of bad names. However, I'm not contending that what happens in The Mission is justified by the inexorable course of history or any of that crap. Individuals have responsibility, both moral and historical. Groups are inherently amoral and possibly incredibly stupid. You have a choice as to what you do...again, referencing the movies, remember Baldwin's advice to Balion from the Kingdom of God, "Never forget that when you stand before God, you cannot say that others made me do it or it was convenient..."

I also find the attitude of the culantros more than a bit simplistic and absurd.

"At the seminar, Dr. McAnany suggested that the very idea of societal collapse might be in the eye of the beholder. She was thinking of the Maya, whose stone ruins have become the Yucatan’s roadside attractions. But the descendants of the Maya live on. She recalled a field trip by local children to a site she was excavating in Belize: “This little girl looks up at me, and she has this beautiful little Maya face, and asks, ‘What happened to all the Maya? Why did they all die out?’”

"No one visits Stonehenge, she noted, and asks whatever happened to the English."

"Hobbit-thinking. The people who put up Stonehenge were probably exterminated by the Celts leaving France for the western Islands to escape predatory tribes, climactic change or just because. England as a place didn't exist for a long time, and required the Romans, Saxons, Vikings and Normans to actually exist. Stonehenge proves the bloody point. Shit happens, bad things happen to more or less not so bad cultural groups individuals hide behind the group for cover...People are neither inherently good nor evil, they just are. 

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[Frederick]

I'm convinced the Amish will outlast us all.