Resumen de Turning history into a binary code
To test his hypothesis about how moralizing, prosocial religions evolved, University of British Columbia psychologist Ara Norenzayan needs help from the humanities. Did moralizing gods, community-wide rituals, and supernatural punishment emerge before or after societies became politically complex? Has any large-scale society succeeded without prosocial religion? And what does "moralizing" really mean at different times and in difficult cultures? To answer these questions in a rigorous, scientific way, he and his colleagues are trying to convince historians to turn the nuanced knowledge in their heads into the kind of data scientists need: a database's binary code of yes/no answers. By creating the Database of Religious History, the big gods team is attempting to bridge the gulf between humanistic and scientific scholarship—but success hinges on enticing leading historians and religious studies scholars to join them.
