The geographers over at Geocurrents have two good introductory posts on why the generalized theory of "continents" is flawed. The series is started by Nonsense about Continents and finished with How Many Continents Are There? The posts briefly describe a point brought up in blogger Dr. Martin Lewis' book The Myth of Continents.
In my previous post, Where is Asia?, I wrote how Asia was an artificial construct made by the Greeks to describe the lands and people east of them. And how today what we consider Europe, Africa, and Asia actually spill into each other.
Other geographers feel that continents are a flawed way of studying and examining the world. Dr. Harm de Blij uses "geographic realms" in his textbooks books. These realms are lands of similar cultural traits and physical landforms.
Continents are a good starting point for learning about the world but as one advances one quickly realizes that the physical and cultural landscape is so much more interrelated and complex than first imagined.
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