This question is sparked by a discussion of Guns, Germs, and Steel, but it is not a continuation of that discussion. A complaint was made that Diamond presented determinism and that got me wondering. I know the philosophical discussions regarding determinism and free will and such, I wondered what historians here think about the topic. What is too deterministic? Or where can we identify historical causality?

My position is that I see history moving from a humanity to a science. That if we find cause we find cause. Sometimes an individual is critical and agency matters, sometimes it does not.

I would say this is most clear in history of science. Maxwell was a genius, Einstein was a genius. But if neither one of them lived physics today would be pretty much the same with the same equations. The path would be different and certainly it is the job of historians to document and understand those paths, but we would get to the same place.