Origins 2022: Fun Times!

 Well, despite a lot of weird setbacks this year, we've finished another mostly smooth and successful Origins conference.  This is our second year with the Creation Theology Society, and it's been a blessing to have those guys with us giving us good biblical guidance.  That's their interdisciplinary panel discussion in the photo above.  I've been very encouraged by all of their work.

There was a lot of emphasis on baraminology and especially baraminology methods this year, and that was also exciting.  Regular readers might remember that there's been criticism of baraminology over the past few years (some of it good and some of it not so good), and despite my work showing that the methods aren't as bad as everyone says, it's definitely nice to see a real effort to diversify.

As always, the conference has also been a fertile time for good ideas.  I talked to folks about the historical Abraham and what that means for our understanding of creation, the language of DNA (which is something I've been interested in for a looooooooong time), developing molecular methods for baraminology, and public presentation of my human origins research.  Expect to see the fruit of some of these projects in the future.  I'm pretty excited.

My favorite talk was Steve Austin's presentation of his work looking for evidence of the ancient Hopi Lake, upstream of the Grand Canyon.  He just finished up some field work with drones and showed some impressive evidence of ancient shorelines.  Even I could see the evidence he was talking about.  The lake's all dried up now, but the shoreline remains.  Very cool stuff.

Next year is ICC, and the Origins conference will go on a bit of hiatus.  We won't have the normal abstract presentations, but we will be there in some way.  Thanks to everyone who came to the conference, and I'm looking forward to 2023!

Now I'm off to a certain natural history museum to do some research for my hominin project.  Maybe I'll post a little update.  Stay tuned!

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Have you read my book?  You should check that out too!