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Wanderlost - Delayed
I am recovering nicely, thank you. But during the times when I would have worked on the cartoon, I was in bed with a fever. It wasn't a total loss. I re-read Douglas Addams' Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, which I discovered was much better than I had thought on my first read fifteen years ago.
Still marching my way through Richard Dawkins' The Ancestors' Tale, conceived a la Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales as a pilgrimage backwards through time toward several "rendesvous" with other species at points of common ancestry, or "concestors." Along the way, each species has a "tale" to tell: The Neanderthal's Tale, The Bonobo's Tale, etc. While my understanding of evolution deepens, occasionally I have to bring my head up for air.
On one such gasp, I youtubed Dawkins and came across a series of lectures he and other prominent scientists delivered a year or so ago on the conflicts between science and religion. You can watch the whole series at Beyond Belief 2006. Despite the high percentage of atheists among the speakers, don't expect total harmony of thought or "group think" among them - they are scientists, after all. Some, like Dawkins or Sam Harris, view religion as an enemy to be vanquished; others view religion as something to be accommodated as scientists seek to overcome public fears and ignorance regarding, say, the orbit of the earth around the sun; and still others argue that science and religion are, in Stephen Jay Gould's words, "non-overlapping magesteria." One thing everyone agrees on: intelligent design is bullshit. If you have the time, check it out.
Thanks for the link to the conference! I can't wait to watch it. If you're interested in reading a book that does an excellent job debunking Intelligent Design, I'd heartily recommend Tower of Babel, by Pennock.