Emergent structures have the property of being possible to generalize about and simulate to some extent by simpler means than the modeling of their most fundamental components. When this is not the case, it means the large scale result of the fundamental components is chaotic.<p>But if such a chaos were to characterize any given scale of any universe, intelligent life at that scale would be impossible. When the author asks, "How can the same sorts of simple equations keep appearing at every scale of nature that we look for them?", my (perhaps simplistic) answer is that if chaos were to entirely characterize a given scale, that scale would be too remote from ours to be observable. Chaos would be the barrier to observation.<p>So, I would venture that emergence as we observe it in the universe is not that surprising or miraculous, but inevitable. Though I may be wrong and/or not the first to provide this "explanation".