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Causality applies everywhere, and it is hard even to imagine a world in which it does not. Yet, one must acknowledge that life also is creative and diverse. Un-der these circumstances, the question emerges whether causal models can ex-plain life's creativity and diversity. Some life scientists say yes, yet many hu-manities scholars cast doubts or have posited that they have reached the end of theory. Here, I build on common empirical observations as well as long-accumulated modeling experience, and I review and further develop a unified framework for causal modeling that applies to all sciences including physics, biology, the sciences of the city, and the humanities.

Sigfried Giedion (1888-1968) was a foremost Swiss architectural historian. Teaching at Harvard, Yale, MIT, the Chicago School of Design, and at ETH Zurich, he deeply shaped the idea of modern architecture. One of Giedion’s best known works was his book chapter on the Chicago school. It was a key piece of historiography, embedded in the broader context of his famous publication of 1941, "Space, Time and Architecture." However Giedion's historic sources for the Chicago school were long believed to be lost or absent, which made his historiography target of endless academic debates. This present article recovers Giedion's sources, and it also evaluates the role of his publication in a larger history of cultural diversification and growth: After Giedion's work appeared, multiple schools of thought all named “Chicago school” unexpectedly rose to prominence together. Many of these schools already existed decades before the 1940s, but they were less well known than thereafter. Why did this collective growth only come into action after such an extended period of formation? As an explanation to this question, I developed a theory of cultural dissemination and reception that makes statements about the interplay between entire groups of authors and audiences. The theory builds on evolutionary models extensively studied in other disciplines. In the humanities, the theory may help us understand processes of formation and growth. In our particular case, Giedion is placed in a larger process of diversification. As a more general finding, the broad validity of the causal model developed here suggests that the world around us is often shaped by similar principles of self-organization.

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