Abstract: In this talk, I will discuss two central questions in nuclear physics: (1) understanding and predicting diverse nuclear properties from the underlying physics of only two or three nucleons and (2) the origin of emergent orderly patterns in the intricate nuclear dynamics. In particular, I will address a long-standing challenge: the emergence from first principles of collectivity and clustering in light- to medium-mass nuclei, with implications for reproducing enhanced E2 transitions without effective charges, for the formation of alpha clustering, and for the description of alpha-capture reactions of interest to nucleosynthesis. This is achieved by using physically relevant  degrees of freedom within the symmetry-adapted no-core shell-model framework, which exploits approximate symmetries that, we find, dominate nuclear dynamics.