Richard Dawkins

Because we don't have to.

You do, because cannot, they're the exact opposite of each other.

Okay, well, we'll have to agree to differ about that.

Look, I want to ask you, I want to challenge something.

What?

Okay.

Proto-Indo-European, supposed to be the ancestor of a very large number of languages, all European languages except Basque and several Indian.

Well, in evolutionary biology, it is a fact that if you take any two animals you like, like, for example, you and a kangaroo,

There is a single individual animal which is the most recent common ancestor of you and a kangaroo, and that's an individual.

I literally mean an individual.

There was a mother animal, looked a bit like a shrew or something like that, which had two children.

playing together in the dust and one of those children became the ancestor of humans and the other of those children became the ancestor of kangaroos.

That is literally true, an individual.

Now I suspect that linguists suffer from, well, you've heard the phrase physics envy, academic disciplines.

Envy physicists.

Well, I suspect that linguists envy biologists this ability to trace back to a single ancestor.

I don't think there was such a thing as proto-Indo-European in that sense.

I suspect that it was never a, well, of course there was, but the idea that there was a single language which then spread

by some kind of mysterious influence all over europe and the indian subcontinent it would have been a hybrid of some sort as i believe we could say english is because english is a mixture of germanic and romance languages i bet proto-indo-european was a hybrid in the same way and it's

It's biology envy that makes linguists try to trace back to a single ... We do have that envy.