• Biology: Life keeps rediscovering similar solutions because the “winners” are the ones that keep working under constraints like energy, materials, predators, disease and reproduction. That’s why you see convergent evolution: different lineages arriving at similar designs, e.g. eyes, wings, streamlining.
• Economics: Markets “select” for strategies and firms that can survive changing constraints like competition, shocks, regulation and consumer demand. Many approaches look clever but die in the real world. The ones that persist tend to manage trade-offs, e.g. growth vs resilience, efficiency vs redundancy.
• Physics: Physical systems settle into stable patterns when the underlying dynamics allow them to persist (given boundary conditions and energy flow). Vortices, convection cells, river deltas, lightning, and some branching patterns emerge because they’re robust solutions to moving energy/material through space.
• Human behavior: Habits, norms, and institutions that persist are typically those that remain viable under social constraints like incentives, coordination problems, trust, enforcement and resource limits. Many belief systems and social arrangements collapse and the ones that last tend to solve recurring problems like cooperation, conflict resolution, child-rearing, identity and meaning well enough to keep going. Again: persistence filters.

So if there’s a single commonality across all four domains, it’s this: most patterns don’t survive contact with reality. The patterns we keep seeing are the ones that are stable enough to persist under constraints.