Thoughts on Origins 2021
What a weekend! We just finished up the Origins 2021 conference yesterday, and I'm both excited and exhausted (as usual). In total, we had nineteen presentations, a panel discussion, and a field trip over the course of three days. It was also the first time the new Creation Theology Society joined us, and their presentations elicited a lot of good reaction and conversation.
Since last year's conference was entirely online, this was our first in-person conference in two years. Since we expected COVID to still be a problem, we wanted to keep the conference as simple as possible and easy to cancel. So we opted for multiple live venues with video streaming from one site to another. That worked OK. We did have to cancel one venue because of COVID, so that worked exactly as we expected. But the technical challenges were predictably challenging.
Even though there were a lot of technical problems, I think people generally enjoyed being together at the California and Tennessee sites, and there were another three dozen who participated entirely online. Let's call it a modest success.
What about the presentations? Yeah... I wish I wasn't debugging our live stream so much, so I could tell you how the talks were. So here's my main takeaway: Tim Brophy reported on his baraminology study of galliform birds (chickens, pheasants, and such), and he used the new BARCLAY software to do the medoid partitioning and fuzzy analysis. His results were very similar to my findings with the mammals. It was very encouraging to me to see someone else doing my kind of research and finding exactly the same thing I did. It's a nice independent confirmation.
I also spent time brainstorming with my friends on research projects for the International Conference on Creationism. That was time well spent. We have a lot of good ideas we'll be working on over the next year.
The CBS executive committee has not had time to talk about next year's conference, but I am definitely looking forward to it.
Have you read my book? You should check that out too!
