Causal models find application in almost all areas of science, and they often support the development of theories that are straightforward and testable. Yet scientists also observe things that surprise them. Fascinated by such observations, they learn to admire the playful aspects of life, as well as its creativity and diversity. Under these circumstances, a compelling question arises: Can causal models explain life’s creativity and diversity? Some life scientists say yes. However, other humanities scholars cast doubt, positing that they reached the end of theory. Here, I build on common empirical observations as well as long-accumulated modeling experience, and I develop a unified framework for causal modeling. The framework gives special attention to life’s creativity and diversity, and it applies to all sciences including physics, biology, the sciences of the city, and the humanities.

Using computational means to understand patterns in how the humanities are men-tioned in U.S. journalism, the WhatEvery1Says project brings into focus challenging problems in the perception of the humanities. This essay reports on the project’s findings and some of the further questions that emerged from them. For example, how does the “humanities crisis” appear among the many crises of our time? Why do the humanities figure so often in connection with concrete, ordinary life yet also seem ab-stract in value? How can more of the substance of humanistic research be communicated as opposed to appearing as just academic business? And why is there so little focus in the media on how underrepresented populations are positioned in relation to the humanities by comparison to science and social, political, or economic issues? The essay concludes by recommending that the humanities reframe their crisis as part of larger human crises requiring multidisciplinary “grand challenge” approaches.

Maritime heritage structures, such as cranes or warehouses, are typical for historical port cities around the world and many of them have received recognition as having Outstanding Universal Value (OUV) and have been listed as UNESCO World Heritage sites. They have often been preserved and revitalized as expressions of former shipping networks and urban power after containerization in the 1960s when modern ports moved out of their historic inner-city locations to urban peripheries. To learn more about the conceptualization of port heritage as part of global flows and local urban systems, we manually checked 1121 abstracts of world heritage sites published on the UNESCO World Heritage Centre website ¹, exploring a group of words describing the typology of buildings and structures associated with port functions and activities. We found 107 World Heritage Sites (out of 1121) related to port cities. By analysing the abstracts of the 107 sites, the authors established a series of findings. Firstly, the concepts of port city and port heritage reflected in the abstracts do not align with the definitions given by encyclopaedias or by people interested in port city research. The texts placed on the UNESCO World Heritage Centre website mainly focus on specific heritage types and values, rather than the bigger picture of maritime-related structures. Secondly, the listed port heritage sites appear to emphasize three port city functions: maritime trade, defence and colonial practices. Other functions that include housing, leisure or religion are rarely mentioned in the abstracts. Thirdly, since port cities are places where sea meets the land, nature meets human settlements, they should stress the nature-culture connection. Yet, the listed world heritage sites present a culture-nature dichotomy in the testified OUV.

Creativity is everywhere. Diversity is everywhere. Digitization is everywhere. This present article gives a new perspective on my and my laboratory's work over the last decade, explaining why creativity, diversity, and digitization go everywhere together.

“What is life?” and Erwin Schrödinger's answer, “negative entropy”, inspired researchers in the 20th century to unite physics, chemistry, and physiology into a new synthesis that many believe to be an important foundation for life science today. Decades after Schrödinger, life scientists are still fascinated by the riddle that entropy can only accumulate in physical systems, which often leads to biological deterioration and death, but life finds ways to persist and prevail. So to say, life “negates” entropy. Can this fascination and research concept be broadened even further to human culture? Short after Schrödinger's publication, Claude Shannon coined the term “information entropy.” Information entropy accumulates when noise interferes during communication. Eventually, all useful information is lost. Yet, from this observation, something surprising can be inferred. Not only biological life but also cultural life has the ability to persist and prevail in spite of the accumulation of entropy. Does this insight mean that cultural life also negates entropy, in Schrödinger's sense? These questions guided me over several years of research during which I developed and tested a new theory of culture based on variation-selection processes and homeostatic regulation. My contribution is to discover that these two processes not only make statements about biological life. They also explain some of the most important phenomena of culture: returning fashions, polarization, diversification, cycles of growth and reform, and the formation of common ethos across entire bodies of knowledge. With access to big data and supercomputing, I tested my theory against hundreds of thousands of news, magazine articles, books, and TV transcripts as well as textual content collected from the social media. Historical, institutional, and geographical information was extracted from these data using a new method; and new interactive tools were created to interpret the results. What should not be missed when reading this article is that the theory proposed here reveals a striking equivalence between nature and culture. The article states this equivalence in mathematical terms, and contextualizes it in the history of science. The mathematical breakthrough is relevant because it aligns the humanities to science while also allowing for live evaluation of what I call “cultural diversification cycles.”