The issue most historians and many other academics have with deterministic theories is that they reduce what is usually a very complex issue into a very simple, usually singular explanation. Almost by definition, that explanation - where some extremely complex process that may happen over centuries is claimed to result from a very limited set of causal factors - is going to be either outright wrong or at least very misleading.

There are few historians who would say that environment, for example, has no effect on how the history (for instance) plays out. But the more deterministic treatments, like Jared Diamond's infamous Guns, Germs and Steel, tend to advance a claim that the environment (for example) has been the deciding factor that explains, for example, why Europeans were technologically more advanced. Such works almost invariably have to mangle their source material quite a bit to present their argument. If you search for "Guns, germs and steel" from /r/AskHistorians, you should quickly see several examples.

Sometimes this is deliberate, and those who are found to resort to deliberate fact-twisting to advance a pet argument are rightly reviled in the academia. More often, though, the author has a pet argument and then more or less unconsciously selects only material that supports that particular argument. As physicist Richard Feynman once put it, in science the easiest person to fool is oneself: when a researcher believes she has a nice theory, she will quite often go to some lengths to "prove" it. The reason many academics dislike such researchers and, in particular, their popular books is because these theories are often very compelling to those who aren't well versed in the subject - but may leave out so many important issues that they give a completely skewed view of what the broader academic community believes have been important factors or caveats.

Simplistic theories like determinism rise up every now and then because so many people are attracted to simple explanations and seem to want to believe that complex events should have simple, easily explainable causes. Promoting radically simple theories is often a good way to gain publicity and publishing contracts, and if one could "prove" such a theory, then one could really make one's mark in academia. Those reasons, in my opinion, go a long way towards explaining why despite everything there are always those who wish to reduce complex issues to simple causes, although I may be overly deterministic here :).

EDIT: Here's a very good answer from /u/anthropology_nerd examining what's wrong with Guns, Germs and Steel, and it may help you to understand why we usually dislike determinism.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2mkcc3/how_do_modern_historians_and_history/

To add a personal experience: I have a MSc in engineering, with experience from product development, and I'm now finishing a PhD in what is to all intents and purposes history of technology. In both of my "professional lives" I've noticed that the more I know about the subject, the more I understand how deeply unsatisfactory the simple, deterministic explanations I used to believe have been. As a layman, I used to have strong opinions about both topics; after years of study and practice, I'm far more ambivalent. To follow a rule that the fields I've happened to study are not likely to be exceptions, I now consider the deterministic and simplistic explanations in the fields I have no idea about as suspect until proven otherwise.

Oooowee, it’s a geographer’s time to shine! So I will start with your first question, why is environmental determinism incorrect, and leave the second question (why is Europe “more technologically advanced”) for a historian of pre-Columbian America, although 1491 by Charles Mann is a good overall read about the history of indigenous people pre and during contact which goes through some myths about how advanced civilizations were and also challenges what our notions of “advancement” are.

You may actually not learn a lot about environmental determinism in history, because while it has recently infiltrated this discipline’s ranks, it is a geographical theory at its core. In fact, it was the theory that geographers put forth as the reason for geography to be a separate discipline in universities, around the turn of the century when universities were professionalizing and disciplinary boundaries were becoming more rigid. Gone were the days of “naturalist-biologist-philosopher-political theorist” – you had to be a specialist. (Man, as an interdisciplinary grad student today, but a woman, I’m both nostalgic and not at all nostalgic for those times.)

We can find the beginnings of “environment determines people” (but not the same thing as environmental determinism) in the classical era, when the concept of “humours” abounded. Hippocrates came up with the idea of human health and behavior determined by the balance of “humours” or bodily fluids, and said that climate would influence the balance of those humours and therefore people’s temperament. This continued through the medieval times up into Renaissance, particularly among English scholars who conveniently found that England’s mild temperature (not too hot, not too cold) bred the perfect people. The debate over environment’s influence on people continued, particularly after Europeans colonized the New World, because of course if climate influenced people, what would that say about the descendants of these Europeans in new climates? Anti-deterministic thinkers noted that perhaps “particular climates had not made races, but that races were made for particular climates” (Livingstone p. 372). This essentially meant that different “races” of man would have been created at different times, as in, had different origins and were wholly different creatures from each other. That’s a terrifying thought – in many ways, even though environmental determinism is deeply racist, it’s actually less racist than the other possible dominant ideology because at least it claimed all humans were the same species.

Skipping ahead a bit in time: Environmental determinism as a named theory comes after, but is not directly evolved from, Darwinism and neo-Lamarckian influences on geography. Quick review: while Darwin’s theory of evolution is the one we all learn today (survival of the fittest, natural selection, blah blah blah) you may also recall from high school science that Lamarck also put forth an (incorrect) version of evolution. The giraffe was the quintessential example: a giraffe with a shorter neck lives in an area where all the trees have leafy crowns. In order to reach the delicious leaves, the giraffe stretches his neck ever so slightly, elongating it to reach higher leaves. Then these stretched giraffes have babies, with slightly longer necks inherited from their parents, and those babies learn to stretch their necks as well, and on and on. We can more easily see the origins of deterministic thinking here (people can’t pass down climatic adaptations that they choose themselves to their children in their DNA) and also clearly point to how its scientific foundations are fundamentally wrong.

Two American geographers are noted for pushing this theory, as a way to stake geography’s claim separate from geology, or anthropology, and Ellen Semple is the most well known of the two. The other is Ellsworth Huntington, who served as the president of the Association of American Geographers, and I will quote from his presidential address of 1924 here:

“The pinnacle of geography is reached when we are able to explain why certain types of human character, certain manifestations of genius, and hence certain lines of progress and stages of civilization are located in various parts of the world. Why, for example, was a marvelous outburst of genius concentrated in the little province of Attica? Why are the people of South China the most progressive of those who long lived within the tropics, while the northern Chinese, on the contrary, are among the most backward of the people in latitudes 35 degrees to 40 degrees?”

And it goes on. Later gems include: attributing cultural traits to natural selection (such as calling those who saved more money to immigrate to Australia “selected because they have the ability to save more money”); praising California’s people because it is so “difficult” to reach (“The easier the migration, the lower the average quality of the migrants.”) which as a lifelong Californian I find just so hilarious; and just some blatant racism (“It may be pure accident, but it was interesting to me that the first and only educated Chinese woman with whom I ever dined was a Hakka.”)

(This history as stated above is a selected summary of Livingstone’s chapter “Environmental Determinism” in The Sage Handbook of Geographical Knowledge 2011.)

Environmental determinism really fell out of style around World War II in geography, partially because geography as a field was greatly changed by the scientific-military-academic-industrial complex of the war (see Barnes and Farish 2006 “Between Regions: Science, Militarism, and American Geography from World War to Cold War” for an excellent history of that). It is still a pretty untouchable subject in the field, except to criticize, which is why Diamond’s book causes many groans in geography departments. I know that many others have already taken apart why his book in particular is so flawed, but I will still summarize Blaut’s argument in his 1999 article “Environmentalism and Eurocentrism” in the Geographical Review. Essentially he points out Eurocentric historians and geographers make multiple fatal flaws, and I’ll quote directly because it’s excellent:

“The argument becomes environmentalistic if it either claims that an environmental quality existed in Europe when it did not exist there, or claims that an environmental quality as an important cause of European progress when the truly important causes were cultural, or—most crucially—makes a false comparison with the environments of other places and then proclaims that the differences between European and non-European environments explain, or help to explain, the differential rise of Europe.”

So Blaut clearly takes down Diamond geographic arguments – that domestic plants can’t be disseminated on north-south continential axes (hello, distribution of corn planted from modern day Massachusetts to Peru); that sedentary farming is the most ultimate evolution of human behavior; some clear geographic lies (for instance about Europe’s geography “separating” groups from each other when that was not at all the case).