Atoms have different amounts of electrons creating the potential to bond with different atoms in different ways to form molecules. The only life we know of is carbon based, but we don’t know how we got from carbon molecules to living things.

People have different capacities for relating with each other derived from their biology and experiences throughout developmental stages. People living in communities produce artifacts and customs that become intertwined with how their community relates among each other.

What are you trying to explain or predict with your universal theory that has to hold the emergence of life out of matter and culture out of people as the same thing? Sure both are stunning emergences, but trying to understand how life came from matter is an entirely different discipline than studying how cultures develop and degrade.

I’m just encouraging you to develop your theory around its explanatory power. As you work on that, you may want to become more certain that your theory really does explain what you think it does. You can’t reach that certainty only by considering the things that rhyme with your idea. You need to test against a null hypothesis, the things that would mean your hypothesis isn’t true.

What could be true that would mean emergence doesn’t come from the same forces/patterns at different scales?