Continent Introductio", Waldseemüller noted that the earth is divided into four parts, Europe, Asia, Africa and the fourth part, which he named "America" after Amerigo Vespucci's first name. On the map, the word "America" was placed on part of South America. From the 16th century the English noun "continent" was derived from the term "continent land", meaning continuous or connected land and translated from the Latin "terra continens". The noun was used to mean "a connected or continuous tract of land" or mainland. It was not applied only to very large areas of land—in the 17th century, references were made to
Largest-scale trends in evolution not yet been empirically confirmed. Evolutionary theory might not predict largest-scale trends, but there may be such trends nonetheless. McShea (1996) looks at the empirical evidence for a trend towards increasing complexity in Metazoan fossils. He concludes that the evidence is not decisive and further investigation is required. Largest-scale trends in evolution The history of life on Earth seems to show a clear trend; for example, it seems intuitive that there is a trend towards increasing complexity in living organisms. More recently evolved organisms, such as mammals, appear to be much more complex than organisms, such as bacteria, which have