Spatiotemporal patterns appear spontaneously in nonequilibrium for a broad variety of physical systems. Examples are convective patterns in clouds, patterns in semiarid vegetation, filamentation in nonlinear optics, and pattern formation at the skin of animals. These patterns show a striking similarity even if the underlying physical systems are microscopically different. For this reason the description of nonequilibrium pattern formation relies on generic nonlinear dynamical equations that appear from a variety of physical systems. Several examples of such generic equations of motion are discussed in the talk.