Stephen Wolfram made a good try to explain a lot of these phenomena in his book "a new kind of science". He's basically proposing to use cellular automatons (like In the famous game of Life), tiny cells with simple rules that interact together to form something big that is way more complex to rebuild and thus understand certain aspects of nature
Fractals occur at weakest points. We know exactly why they form. Predicting them within a a system before it breaks (identifying the weak points), is much more complicated and usually leads to one sounding like Captain Hindsight.
wired: it's almost as if fractals appear in otherwise unrelated phenomena in our world for reasons we don't entirely understand