I was listening to an interview with Ian Morris (here, if you are interested) on his book Why the West Rules -- For Now. The basic argument seems to mirror the environmental determinism in Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel pretty closely. Morris is more nuanced and allows for culture and technology to change the meaning of geography. Like how the Atlantic went from being a barrier to a "highway" with the invention of ships capable of traveling long distances. The argument seems to boil down, at core, to the same one as Diamond's. Has it been met with the same criticism?
Yes and no.
The stated purpose of Ian Morris's recent work is pretty revealing.
“I suggested that the best way to resolve the two-century old debate about why the West rules is by building a social development index, because this will allow us to compare Western with non-Western development over long periods.”
Morris focuses heavily on quantifying history- Diamond we might say focuses more on qualifying history. That is to say; Morris wants to establish numbers and measures of societies, whereas Diamond is focused more on exploring and describing attributes. Morris is trying to make history more scientific and quantifiable.
So Morris has received a very different sort of criticism than Diamond. Rather than call him deterministic or perhaps snidely call his work 'derivative', 'unoriginal', or what have you- charges all leveled at Diamond's popular synthesis- criticism is more directed as Morris's methodology. Since he is trying to compare completely different societies across time and space, he tries to come up with meaningful measures so that they can be compared- yet for some those measures are still very much Euro-centric and not readily measurable to begin with.
If you have time, I would check out the opening of following book- Morris spends some time attacking- or setting straight- his critics.