5.

The Indo-Aryan controversy is a real debate

A reply to Nicholas Kazanas
(2 Feb. 12, Quaderni di Semantica, Bologna, June 2012.)
In his review article Semantics of the Indo-Aryan Controversy, Prof. em. Nicholas Kazanas takes
issue with a restatement by Prof. Stephanie Jamison [2006] of the dominant position in the debate on
the Urheimat or Homeland of the Indo-European (IE) language family. She had defended the longestablished theory that the family originated somewhere in the vast Eurasian space, definitely outside
India, and that the presence of its Indo-Aryan branch in India can only be the consequence of an
immigration from the Homeland into India. In our student days, our professors routinely called this the
Aryan invasion, but nowadays they have become squeamish about this military-sounding term and
prefer to speak of an Aryan immigration.
In the past two decades, this so-called Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) has been challenged by a revival
of the single oldest IE Homeland theory, the one that has been labeled, first apparently by Edwin
Bryant, as the Out-of-India Theory (OIT). If the Indo-Aryan (IA) branch of IE wasnt brought into
India by immigrants, the only alternative to explain the spread of IE is emigration from India of a
critical mass of people that could impart varieties of Indo-European to the locals in Central Asia and
beyond. Note however, that the more extreme and all too vocal variety of AIT skeptics even refuses to
entertain any questions about the non-Indian branches of the IE family, a concept they simply reject.
Having established to their own satisfaction the Indian origin of the IA languages, they do not care for
how the linguistic landscape beyond the Khyber Pass has evolved. They show no interest in trying
their chance at turning the tables on the invasionists by tracing an Aryan migration from India in the
archaeological or linguistic record. Thus, their anti-invasionist position is not accurately described by
the phrase Out of India.
In a volume Bryant co-edited with Laurie Patton [2005], a number of arguments for and against the
OIT have been juxtaposed. In her review of this collection, Jamison has lambasted the pro-OIT
contributions, among them Kazanass. We now look into his rebuttal. It is to be noted that he is a
veteran of this polemic, never leaving an attack by a colleague on his pro-OIT position unanswered
[e.g. Kazanas 2010 vs. Thomson 2010, with more instances available on his website
www.omilosmeleton.gr]. This probably explains why he has kept his refutation a bit sketchy, as if tired
from having said it all before and mostly without noticeable effect.
Kazanas is a convert from the AIT, which he had included in his teaching for twenty years. The same
is true for all Westerners and quite a few Indians who now give their reserved or unreserved support to
the OIT or at least to an Aryan non-invasion theory. Thus, B.B. Lal made his name as an archaeologist
in the 1950s and 60s by exploring the Painted Grey Ware culture, which he then identified as the
Aryan invader culture during its expansion from the Panjab border zone deeper into India; but along
the way he realized that his data offered no support to the AIT which he had been using as a prism
through which to interpret the data. In recent years, he has been one of the most authoritative
spokesmen for the skeptical position regarding the AIT. Though the OIT had been the first hypothesis
in the IE Homeland debate, it was marginalized by the mid-19th century and all scholars trained during
the 20th century used to take the AIT for granted. Consequently, all scholars who are part of the
academic system (i.e. disregarding traditionally-schooled Sanskritists in India) and accept the OIT are
necessarily converts from the AIT. To date, we havent heard of any conversions in the opposite
direction.

5.1. Disbelief in archaeology

An important point of dispute is the importance of archaeology for the IE Homeland question: belittled
by Jamison, emphasized by Kazanas. Within academe, where most linguists uphold the AIT, it is
among archaeologists, some in the West and most in India, that the AIT is rejected most confidently.
Kazanas reminds us that this is for a very good reason, viz. the total absence of any material traces of a
population identifiable as IE-speaking and moving towards and then into India. We learn that this was
admitted already by Burrow [1975:21], but without shaking his belief in the AIT: The Aryan invasion
of India is recorded in no written document and it cannot yet be traced archaeologically but it is
nevertheless established as a historical fact on the basis of comparative philology. That seems to sum
up Jamisons position as well. The silence of the archaeological record has been admitted even by
Prof. Michael Witzel [2000:15] in the heat of the renewed Homeland debate: So far, clear
archaeological evidence has just not been found.
The absence of such an invasion, combined with the fact of an IE linguistic kinship, would then
require an expansion of early IE dialects from India. Therefore, at a seminar of the Indian Council for
Historical Research held in Delhi in February 2002, seminar convenor Prof. D.N. Tripathi had
declared that since recent archaeological search in the Harappan shows no evidence of an Aryan
invasion or migration which changed the demography, it can [be] concluded that the Indo-[European]
languages originated from this sub-continent. [cit. Brighenti 2005] Some historians present proposed
to pass a resolution to this effect. The seminar proceedings [Tripathi 2005] show most papers
concluding against the AIT, but not contributing material evidence for an out-of-India itinerary. That is
probably why a critical number of scholars present felt the resolution to be premature: Apparently the
resolution did not pass only thanks to the opposition of senior Indian archaeologist B.B. Lal
[Brighenti 2005], who rejects the foreign origin of IA but refuses to jump to conclusions concerning
the other branches of IE, since he and his Indian colleagues have so far not investigated their story.
Aryan invasion theorists have tried to bypass the absence of archaeological evidence by thinking up
scenarios of language replacement that wouldnt require any material changes traceable in the
archaeological record. That exercise can be tried in the opposite direction as well, and with slightly
better chances. While an emigration from India remains yet to be traced, archaeology has identified
elements of a regular Indian presence outside India. A Harappan outpost has been discovered in
Bactria, viz. Shortugai, as has the Central-Asian origin of raw materials used by industries in
Northwest India. Harappan jewelry has been found in Central Asia as well as in Mesopotamia (where
trader settlements from Meluhha have been attested in indigenous sources), proving the existence of
trade networks centred in Northwest India at least during the Harappan period (3 rd mill. BC). Could the
Harappan region already have had a strong economic and cultural impact in Central Asia during the
preceding millennia, with its language serving as a lingua franca, so that it got interiorized in adapted
form later to become the local tribes mother tongue?
5.2. Skirmishes over the material evidence
In his brief paper, Kazanas mentions a few relevant archaeological data and reads them against the
Sanskrit literary testimony of the corresponding objects. Thus, skeletal remains have been found of a
now-extinct Indian equid with only 34 ribs, a count mentioned once in the Rg-Veda: Yet the horses
also in RV have 34 ribs (1.162.18) and not 36 like the Western and Central Asian horse. The
invasionists put this down as merely a lucky hit: the 34-ribbed Shivalik horse had long died out, the
only horse the Vedic people knew was the Central-Asian horse with 36 ribs, but on this occasion they
simply miscounted. A tinge of special pleading there, but a single hit is not much as evidence, it could
still be some kind of coincidence.
Kazanas has repeatedly argued that the ratha in the Rig-Veda is not a two-wheeled chariot used in
races and on the battlefield, but a cart, sometimes a large one for multiple passengers. The war chariot

is typical of the mid-2nd millennium, as in the Hittite-Egyptian war and the Trojan war, and in
Kazanass count, the Rig-Veda had already been completed by then.
The difference in material culture between the Harappan cities and Rig-Vedic society is explained by
having the latter precede the former in time: However, the RV itself provides ample evidence that the
hymns were composed before the Harappan urbanised culture starting c. 3000. The rigvedic hymns
know nothing of the Harappan culture, its brick constructions, iconography, cotton, silver, rice, wheat,
urbanisation, writing and so on. These characteristic Harappan features are found in post-rigvedic
texts: vrhi, rice, in Atharva Veda; godhma, wheat, and rajata hiraya, silver, in Yajur Veda;
karpsa, cotton, in Baudhyanas Stras; iak, brick in houses and fixed altars in the Yajur Veda
and Brhmaas. This argument for a higher chronology of the Vedas, first launched by K.D. Sethna
(1981), has to our knowledge never received a proper answer from the invasionist school.
Likewise, the evidence of the Saraswati river pleads against the low chronology proposed by the AIT.
Though on discussion forums we still see it hotly denied, Kazanas cites the best sources for his
assertion that archaeologists and palaeohydrologists are now certain that the river Sarasvat (todays
streamlet Sarsuti, Hakra or Ghaggar) flowed into the Arabian sea prior to 3200. That is how the river
is described in one of the oldest parts of the Rig-Veda (7.95.2). Even later, undeniably, many hymns
in all the Madalas,
except the fourth, even late ones in Book 10, praise this mighty river, because its

shrinking took place in phases before reaching its present humble condition. By the time of the
Mahbhrata war, which in Hindu tradition marks the completion of the Vedic age, the river has lost
its grandeur while its point of disappearance in the Rajasthan desert has become a place of pilgrimage.
While there is nothing sacrosanct about Max Mllers tentative chronology (which he later retracted)
of a Vedic age starting only from 1500 BC, we should not go too far in extending Vedic chronology
deeper into the past. After reading Kazanass sensible arguments for a pre-Harappan Rig-Veda, we
wonder if he isnt pulling it too far when faced with the following statement: On this evidence of the
RV alone, all IE dates have to be pushed back to at least the Mesolithic period. Mesolithic, that means
before the Neolithic revolution, the leap from hunting-gathering economies to a self-sustaining
economy based on agriculture and cattle-breeding. That shift was definitely an accomplished fact in
the society that forms the background of the Rig-Veda. How many millennia would Kazanas assume
between the dispersal of the IE dialect continuum into various wandering daughter languages and the
composition of the Rig-Veda? After all, he himself has argued better than anyone that the Vedic
language is still quite close to what PIE must have looked like.
Kazanas tangentially brings in the fast-increasing genetic evidence. Genes dont speak a human
language anymore than pottery shards do, but they say a lot about migration history. However, we
think it is premature to draw conclusions from the genetic data because they do not yet have the high
resolution needed to decide on the crucial chronological questions in the Urheimat and invasion
debates. Thus far, they confirm the phenotypically obvious fact of a fairly close kinship between
Europeans, West-Asians and Northwest-Indians, with the European element decreasing as you move to
Indias Southeast. Thus, in South India, a sizable percentage of the population has lactose intolerance,
just like East-Asians do, whereas North-Indians share in the European mutation of lactose tolerance.
But this European-looking element in the North-Indian type may be unrelated to any Aryan
migration: it may be due e.g. to the southward movement of Northern populations during the Ice Age,
millennia before any date reasonably estimated for the IE dispersal. Conversely, the non-European
element in the North-Indian population, while firmly tying it to the South-Indian people, need not
exclude the entry of a small Aryan population that managed to gain the ascendancy and impart its
language.
Showing some genetic kinship is not sufficient to decide the invasion debate. It must be related to a
migration history specifically in the immediate post-Harappan centuries (say, 1700 BC, a time for
which physical anthropology of the older skull-measuring type emphatically denied evidence of a
population influx) if it is to prove the AIT; or to the pre-Harappan period (say, 4000 BC) if it is to
prove the OIT. That quality of genetic evidence is still being awaited.

The genetic debate is also bedeviled by the problem of the symmetry between the testimony required
for an Aryan immigration and that for an Aryan emigration. Kazanas argues: Here I should mention
that the Harappan cattle also are, like the IAs, shown by DNA studies to be native to India. Now, we
must imagine that, in the AIT scenario, the IAs came to Saptasindhu with their horses and carts but
without cattle! Fine, but in that case, shouldnt the OIT require that traces of Indian zebu cattle be
found in Central Asia and beyond? Should we imagine the IE-speaking cowherds emigrating without
cattle? More data with a higher precision may resolve these questions, but for now, it is best not to
boast support from genetics for either the AIT or the OIT.

5.3. The Piltdown translation

Understandably, Kazanas lashes out repeatedly against the condescending and bullying language so
common in the pro-AIT establishments treatment of the pro-OIT dissenters. In similarly undiplomatic
language (dishonesty,subterranean logic), he himself tries to show that the AIT emperor has no
clothes on. Thus, it was indeed insulting for Jamison to equate the OIT within the Homeland debate
with the Creationist position in the evolution debate, i.e. a proverbial intrusion of religious
obscurantism into the field of scientific research. To be sure, it would nonetheless be fair to do so if
one has shown that the theory is indeed contrary to the evidence and upheld only out of obscurantist
motives,-- but that could only be done in the concluding part of an elaborate argumentation, and not as
an opening shot, as is the case in Jamisons review.
However, Kazanas takes an unnecessary risk by entering the debate on Darwinism and Intelligent
Design itself. People who know little about this biological theme, as must be the case for most
philologists reading his paper, will retain their conventional skepticism of any seeming attempt to stray
from Darwinian orthodoxy. In spite of the excellent authorities cited by Kazanas, the readers may thus
be tempted to bracket him with the lunatic fringe, as was Jamisons intention. But his main point
remains standing: there are no grounds for dismissing the OIT, the oldest contender among the
Homeland theories, as being outside the domain of the scientific method.
Kazanas rejects Michael Witzels attempt [1995:320-321] to find a testimony of the Aryan invasion in
the Baudhyana rauta Stra (BSS 18.44). According to Witzel, the text has Purravas and Urvas
son Amvasu stay home somewhere in Afghanistan while his brother yu migrates into India. This
would provide the missing link between the AIT and Sanskrit literature, which to the dismay of the
AIT school had failed to provide any testimony of the Aryan invasion. But just as the Piltdown Man
proved to be a false trail in the search for the evolutionary missing link between ape and man,
Witzels translation proves to be incorrect.
On that point, we couldnt agree more, having been the first to analyse Witzels rendering as a
mistranslation [Elst 1999:164-165]. The passage actually refers to a westward emigration by Amavasu
from India, in particular from the Saraswati basin, whence his brother Ayu migrated eastward into the
Ganga basin. Amavasus progeny is described as including the Gndhris, the Persians (Paru) and
the Aras, located in Iran or Afghanistan. This was already assumed in passing in earlier translations
of the BSS (surveyed by Vishal Agarwal [2002]), starting with Willem Caland in 1904. Though
Witzels translation has by now been rejected by all specialists who have cared to speak out [e.g.
Cardona & Dhanesh 2007:38-40], there was an objective need for Kazanas to draw attention to it, viz.
because it has remained quite influential, especially in the Indian polemic against the OIT. Thus,

Romila Thapar [1999] and Ram Sharan Sharma [1999:87-89] have used this passage as evidence for
the AIT, so that it has passed into the received wisdom in Indian academic circles.
At the same time, we should caution against reading too much into this testimony of the BSS: the
attested emigration from India by Amavasus descendents need not be part of the expansion of the IE
languages from their putative Homeland. Given that the source is already post-Rig-Vedic, it could
refer to the separation between the Indo-Aryan and Iranian branches of the Indo-Iranian group, or even
to the emigration (possibly related to the desiccation of Northwest India and the abandonment of the
Harappan cities ca. 1900 BC) of those Indo-Aryans who left many traces in West Asia in the 18 th-15th
century BC, long after the proto-Germanic, proto-Slavic etc. tribes had parted company with the IndoAryans. We could even imagine a scenario in which the speakers of Indo-Aryan had entered India a
thousand years earlier and later some of them emigrated back.
Pointing out the polemical excesses allegedly committed by Witzel and Jamison may be useful to
expose and ultimately to change the power equation governing the Aryan invasion debate, but it
cannot decide the debate itself. Thus, AIT skeptics need to keep in mind that the AIT, regardless of its
proponents conduct, still does have some proper arguments in its favour. The most important one is
probably the exchanges between some IE and some or all of the Finno-Ugric languages [Witzel 2003].
OIT proponents cannot hope to convince the scholarly community unless they manage to integrate the
Finno-Ugric data into their migration scenario.

5.4. The status of Sanskrit within IE

Since Jamison doesnt elaborate on the evidence of external contacts such as those with Finno-Ugric,
Kazanas follows her to her own chosen battlefield of the evidence from the internal relations within
the IE family. He starts out by expressing his skepticism of the status quaestionis of IE historical
linguistics, with its reconstruction of unpronounceable labiovelars (*gwh) and of laryngeals, whose
presence in Hittite can more economically be explained by the influence of neighbouring Semitic than
by imputing a whole class of conveniently disappeared consonants to all other branches of the IE
family. Though minoritarian, these criticisms have been uttered before by other fully qualified
scholars, e.g. by Edmund Leach, whom Kazanas quotes as lambasting such monstrous distortion of
facts and concoction of non-facts (reconstructed asterisk words and laryngeals) in order to maintain
an absurd notion like the AIT [Leach 1990]; or in the denunciation of the infamous laryngeal
theory by linguist Gyula Dcsy [1991:17] as a regrettable scholarly aberration which created only
problems where there were none [1991:30].
In spite of these criticisms, Kazanas does work within the paradigm of historical-comparative
linguistics and accepts that a PIE language must have existed. This contrasts with the more extreme
Indian AIT critics such as N.D. Waradpande, Navaratna Rajaram, Srinivasan Kalyanaraman and
Mayuresh Kelkar, who reject reconstructed PIE as a ghost language and dismiss linguistics
altogether as a colonial-racist conspiracy against the unique status of Sanskrit. However, he resonates
somewhat with them when he rejects the assumption that the PIE language can be reconstructed and
when he denounces asterisk-marked reconstructed forms as purely imaginary entities with which
some idle scholars like to play.
Of course the reconstructions are the fruit of a process of imagining, but this process is not playfully
arbitrary; it is guided by reason. The PIE reconstructions are widely admitted to be only

approximative, but are constrained by the demand that they allow for non-contrived phonetic
developments towards the historically attested forms in the daughter languages. The deduction of a
single original form behind the plurality of evolved forms can be compared with the way linguists
deduce an underlying phoneme from an array of physically attested phonetic realizations. However,
we must take to heart Kazanass caution not to treat the reconstructions as more than a useful
hypothesis.
From venting his impatience with the weird applications and implications of the laryngeal theory,
Kazanas seemingly wanders off to land in a different line of argument, which proves highly
interesting. He notes that the word daughter and its cognates in Germanic, Greek and Iranian stand
isolated without related stems in their languages, whereas in Sanskrit, its root duh has many other
derivatives. In an earlier paper, Kazanas [2006] had elaborated this point in great detail with many
more examples, e.g. English son being an isolated word while Sanskrit sunu is derivable from the root
su, procreate. There as here, he concluded that Vedic and even Classical Sanskrit preserve many
more PIE elements than any other branch of IE, which tells on the Homeland question in that
preservation is easier for a sedentary people. Moreover, once it has been attested that the Vedics,
though good at preserving PIE elements, do not preserve any memories of journeys leading to their
habitat, this lends all the more argumentative force to the conspicuous absence of Vedic migration
memories as contrasted with such memories in some other branches of IE.
In the present context, Kazanas applies this difference in etymological depth to some geographical
terms common to Iranian and Indo-Aryan, but standing alone in Iranian while being part of
etymological networks within Sanskrit: the hndu in Avestan Hapta-hndu has no other cognates in
the language, while the Sanskrit lexeme sindh- is quite productive; and likewise, the hara- in Avestan
Haraxvaiti stands isolated while the sras (lake) in Vedic Srasvat, has many cognates from Vedic
sr run, flow swiftly. This, while not amounting to proof, does constitute a serious indication for the
Indian identity of the Iranian memories of origin. For those among us now tempted to suggest that this
root must have been an indigenous non-IE root borrowed into invading Indo-Aryan, Kazanas
reminds us that the Vedic root sr is eminently IE, with cognates in some distant kentum languages.

5.5. More linguistic evidence

Kazanas argues briefly that the isoglosses present a highly chaotic distribution between the IE
branches, showing exchanges between the branches and sub-branches at every stage of development,
rather than (to summarize the authoritative AIT-friendly explanation by Hans Hock [1999]:) an archaic
distribution dating back to the stage of dialectal PIE and preserved during a radial expansion from a
centrally-located Homeland, most plausibly the Pontic steppe. A similar case has been made with
different arguments by Talageri [2008:205-236], which Kazanas dismissively mentions hearing of but
not reading. It has also been made by ourselves [Elst 2007:28-35], and there is no need to repeat the
arguments here. Let it simply be said that the actual distribution of the isoglosses remains compatible
with several migration scenarios and does not prove the Pontic Homeland hypothesis.
The personal disconnect between Professor Kazanas and self-taught scholar Talageri cannot annul the
fact that their argumentations against the AIT are often in parallel. Thus, when the accomplished
mainstream IE linguist, Joanna Nichols (by no means an indigenist) has examined all the linguistic
evidence, isoglosses, loanwords and other aspects, and placed the PIE urheimat in Bactria (), only a
stones throw away from Saptasindhu, it is applauded both here by Kazanas and elsewhere by

Talageri [2008:242-244]. On this point, however, we have to dampen their enthusiasm a little. They
may not be aware of the thorough criticism of Nicholss thesis by Zsolt Simon [2009:60-63], who
rejects her notion of a Eurasian spread zone where the IE expansion must have been a very similar
precedent to the later westward expansions of Scythian and Turkic. It would lead us too far to discuss
Zsolts arguments here, but on purely logical grounds, we can confidently reject his final sentence: To
sum it up: since none of the arguments of Nichols are acceptable, neither methodologically nor
factually, her homeland hypothesis cannot be upheld. Not quite: it is perfectly possible to think up
failing arguments for a correct position, and nothing in Zsolts own arguments imposes the exclusion
of Bactria as Homeland or as staging area for Indian emigrants on their way westwards.
Jamison has been most thorough in discrediting the contribution by the late S.S. Misra [2005] to the
Bryant & Patton volume. Kazanas bypasses her most damaging remarks and focuses on the question
of IE vocalism: Misra is dismissed since he does not follow Jamisons linguistic methodology and
procedures. Yet he (alone) pointed out that Vedic -a- becomes -e- and -o- in Gypsy. () So, Greek o
and e need not be original PIE, as mainstreamers maintain with such rigidity.
In this case, the mainstreamers may well be right. That IA vocalism has changed in the emigrant
Gypsy language need not be a replay of a proto-Indo-Iranian phenomenon, it may simply be an
application of Voltaires observation that etymology is a science in which consonants count for little
and vowels for nothing. As every textbook of IE teaches us, the palatalization that characterizes the
satem languages presupposes an /e/-vowel where Iranian and IA now have an /a/; till today, languages
all over the world show instances of palatalization before the front vowels /e/- and /i/, such as the
middle consonant in Peking > Beijing. Thus, you can go from PIE *gegoma through proto-IndoIranian *jegoma to Sanskrit jagma. Of course, Kazanas could choose to question or even invert the
palatalization scenario as well, so that okto, eight, derives from aa; but that would raise more
problems than it solves.
So, the mainstream pro-AIT position is, in our view, not as hopeless as Kazanas pictures it. To be sure,
the AIT school has sometimes performed poorly and sometimes obnoxiously in putting forward its
case; but that is equally true of the pro-OIT school. But it still has a number of posers handy that the
pro-OIT school has not yet managed to answer with convincing solutions. Meanwhile, the pro-AIT
school itself is in the dock for either failing to answer or even for refusing to take into consideration
certain thorny questions. Thus, Kazanas touches a raw nerve when he asks: how did small numbers
[of immigrants] relative to the indigenous population, as Jamison puts it, accomplish the
sanskritisation of that vast area? How and when did they enter? Some energetic invasion theorists
think up subtle scenarios bypassing the criterion of falsifiability, with an immigration that has
somehow left no traces, but most of them leave it at what Kazanas sums up as: No answer.
.
Conclusion: yes, there is a debate here
Jamisons central thesis in her review article is that what passes for the Aryan invasion debate is
merely a muddle, as there simply cannot be any debate between the pro-AIT scholarly consensus
and the fact-free fantasies of the pro-OIT outsiders, that bunch of Hindu fundamentalists. This position
is a mirror-image of the utter condescension with which the more extreme section of the anti-AIT
camp treat the AIT defenders: as a politically motivated lot out of touch with the latest in the hard
sciences, including archaeology, and clinging to an outdated belief system, viz. 19 th-century IndoGermanic linguistics with its race science offshoot. Jamison has one moral advantage over her

Hindu counterparts: she respects Napoleons dictum not to attribute to malice what can as well be
explained through incompetence. She merely dismisses her opponents as crackpots, whereas they
treat the invasionists as evil agents of a vicious neocolonial conspiracy.
Kazanas doesnt go that far at all, but he too tends to underestimate his opponents and the case they
are presenting. When he dismisses the AIT argumentation as being like the Ptolemaic epicycles, i.e.
a hopelessly contrived attempt to save a failing hypothesis, he is not reducing it to an anti-scientific
religious dogma nor to a malafide exercise in pseudo-science. Somewhat more respectfully, he is
diagnosing it as outdated science: compatible with the state of knowledge in the mid-19 th century, but
since then contradicted by an accumulation of new data or fresh readings of old ones. Like Jamison,
though not to the same extent, he sees the contending theories as steeply unequal in the evidence
arena, no longer the stuff of real debate.
Our own position is that we definitely do have a debate here, and that both sides have presented
arguments that the other side has thus far failed to refute. Rather than seeing both sides resort to the
haughty dismissal of the debate as foregone and superfluous, we prefer to call upon them both to enter
the arena unreservedly and give their best. The answer is probably just around the corner, but we
havent gotten there yet.

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