The emergence of scaling behavior in complex systems has been at the cornerstone of complexity science since its very beginning. Particularly striking is the ubiquity of the so-called "Zipf's Law", a statistical pattern observed in many different systems, from economy to human language. In this talk we explore how fundamental assumptions of complexity and evolution under order/disorder tensions naturally lead to the emergence of this scaling behavior. This model-free, general approach provides an intuitive and elegant explanation of the emergence of such scaling behavior and its ubituity. We will close the talk by showing how G.K. Zipf's hypothesis to explain the emergence of such statistical pattern in complex communication can be properly formalized using the presented theoretical apparatus, thereby demonstrating that his conjecture was right. References: Universality of Zipf's law. Bernat Corominas-Murtra and Ricard V. Solé. Physical Review E 82, 11102 (2010); Emergence of Zipf’s Law in the Evolution of Communication. Bernat Corominas-Murtra, Jordi Fortuny and Ricard V. Solé. Physical Review E 83, 32767 (2011)