This explains everything: deep, beautiful, and elegant theories of how the world works

Evolution by means of natural selection / Susan Blackmore

Life is a digital code / Matt Ridley

Redundancy reduction and pattern recognition / Richard Dawkins

The power of absurdity / Scott Atran

How apparent finality can emerge / Carlo Rovelli

The overdue demise of monogamy / Aubrey de Grey

Boltzmann's explanation of the second law of thermodynamics / Leonard Susskind

The dark matter of the mind / Joel Gold

"There are more things in heaven and earth...than are dreamt of in your philosophy." / Alda Alda

An unresolved (and therefore unbeautiful) reaction to the edge question / Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

Ptolemy's universe / James J. O'Donnell

Quasi-elegance / Paul Steinhardt

Mathematical object or natural object? / Shing-Tung Yau

Simplicity / Frank Wilczek

Simplicity itself / Thomas Metzinger

Einstein explains why gravity is universal / Sean Carroll

Evolutionary genetics and the conflicts of human social life / Steven Pinker

The Faurie-Raymond hypothesis / Jonathan Gottschall

Group polarization / David G. Myers

The price equation / Armand Marie Leroi

Unconscious inferences / Gerd Gigerenzer

Snowflakes and the multiverse / Martin J. Rees

Einstein's photons / Anton Zeilinger

Go small / Jeremy Bernstein

Why is our world comprehensible? / Andrei Linde

Alfvén's cosmos / George Dyson

Our universe grew like a baby / Max Tegmark

Kepler et al. and the nonexistent problem / Gino Segrè

How incompatible worldviews can coexist / Freeman Dyson

Impossible inexactness / Satyajit Das

The next level of fundamental matter? / Haim Harari

Observers observing / Robert Provine

Genes, claustrum, and consciousness / V.S. Ramachandran

Overlapping solutions / David M. Eagleman

Our bounded rationality / Mahzarin Banaji

Swarm intelligence / Robert Sapolsky

Language and natural selection / Keith Devlin

Commitment / Richard H. Thaler

Tit for tat / Jennifer Jacquet

True or false : beauty is truth / Judith Rich Harris

Eratosthenes and the modular mind / Dan Sperber

Dan Sperber's explanation of culture / Clay Shirky

Metarepresentations explain human uniqueness / Hugo Mercier

Why the human mind may seem to have an elegant explanation even if it doesn't / Nicholas Humphrey

Fitness landscapes / Stewart Brand

On oceans and airport security / Kevin P. Hand

Plate tectonics elegantly validates continental drift / Paul Saffo

Why some sea turtles migrate / Daniel C. Dennett

A hot young earth : unquestionably beautiful and stunningly wrong / Carl Zimmer

Sexual-conflict theory / David M. Buss

The seeds of historical dominance / David Pizarro

The importance of individuals / Howard Gardner

Subjective environment / Andrian Kreye

My favorite annoying elegant explanation : quantum theory / Raphael Bousso

Einstein's revenge : the new geometric quantum / Eric R. Weinstein

What time is it? / Dave Winer

Realism and other metaphysical half-truths / Tania Lombrozo

All we need is help / Seirian Sumner

In the beginning is the theory / Helena Cronin

Thompson on development / Paul Bloom

How do you get from a lobster to a cat? / John McWhorter

Germs cause disease / Gregory Cochran

Dirt is matter out of place / Christine Finn

Information is the resolution of uncertainty / Andrew Lih

Everything is the way it is because it got that way / PZ Myers

The idea of emergence / David Christian

Frames of reference / Dimitar D. Sasselov

Epigenetics

the missing link / Helen Fisher

Flocking behavior in birds / John Naughton

Lemons are fast / Barry C. Smith

Falling into place : entropy and the desperate ingenuity of life / John Tooby

Why things happen / Peter Atkins

Why we feel pressed for time / Elizabeth Dunn

Why the sun still shines / Bart Kosko

Boscovich's explanation of atomic forces / Charles Simonyi

Birds are the direct descendants of dinosaurs / Gregory S. Paul

Complexity out of simplicity / Bruce Hood

Russell's theory of descriptions / A.C. Grayling

Feynman's lifeguard / Timo Hannay

The limits of intuition / Brian Eno

The Higgs mechanism / Lisa Randall

The mind thinks in embodied metaphors / Simone Schnall

Metaphors are in the mind / Benjamin K. Bergen

The pigeonhole principle / Jon Kleinberg

Why programs have bugs / Marti Hearst

Cagepatterns / Hans-Ulrich Obrist

The true rotational symmetry of space / Seth LLoyd

The pigeonhole principle revisited / Charles Seife

Moore's Law / Rodney A. Brooks

Cosmic complexity / John C. Mather

The Gaia hypothesis / Scott Sampson

The continuity equations / Laurence C. Smith

Pascal's wager / Tim O'Reilly

Evolutionarily stable strategies / S. Abbas Raza

The Collingridge dilemma / Evgeny Morozov

Trusting trust / Ernst Pöppel

It just is? / Bruce Parker

Subverting biology / Patrick Bateson

Sex at your fingertips / Simon Baron-Cohen

Why do movies move? / Alvy Ray Smith

Would you like blue cheese with it? / Albert-László Barabási

Mother nature's laws / Stuart Pimm

The Oklo pyramid / Karl Sabbagh

Kitty Genovese and group apathy / Adam Alter

The wizard of I / Gerald Smallberg

One coincidence; two déjà vus / Douglas Coupland

Occam's razor / Katinka Matson

Deep time / Alun Anderson

Placing psychotherapy on a scientific basis : five easy lessons / Eric R. Kandel

Transitional objects / Sherry Turkel

Natural selection is simple but the systems it shapes are unimaginably complex / Randolph Nesse

How to have a good idea / Marcel Kinsbourne

Out of the mouths of babes / Nicholas A. Christakis

The beauty in a sunrise / Philip Campbell

The origin of money / Dylan Evans

The precession of the simulacra / Douglas Rushkoff

Time perspective theory / Philip Zimbardo

Developmental timing explains the woes of adolescence / Alison Gopnik

Implications of Ivan Pavlov's great discovery / Stephen M. Kosslyn and Robin Rosenberg

Nature is cleverer than we are / Terrence J. Sejnowski

Imposing randomness / Michael I. Norton

The unification of electricity and magnetism / Lawrence M. Krauss

Furry rubber bands / Neil Gershenfeld

The principle of inertia / Lee Smolin

Seeing is believing : from placebos to movies in our brain / Eric J. Topol

The discontinuity of science and culture / Gerald Holton

Hormesis is redundancy / Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The beautiful law of unintended consequences / Robert Kurzban

We are what we do / Timothy D. Wilson

Personality differences : the importance of chance / Samuel Barondes

Metabolic syndrome : cell energy adaptations in a toxic world? / Beatrice Golomb

Death is the final repayment / Emanuel Derman

Denumerable infinities and mental states / David Gelernter

Inverse power laws / Rudy Rucker

How the leopard got his spots / Samuel Arbesman

The universal algorithm for human decision making / Stanislas Dehaene

Lord Acton's dilemma / Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Fact, fiction, and our probabilitic world / Victoria Stodden

Elegance=complex / George Church

Tinbergen's questions / Irene Pepperberg

The universal turing machine / Gloria Origgi

A matter of poetics / Richard Foreman

The origins of biological electricity / Jared Diamond

Why the Greeks painted red people on black pots / Timothy Taylor

Language as an adaptive system / Andy Clark

The mechanism of mediocrity / Nicholas J. Carr

The principle of empiricism, or see for yourself / Michael Shermer

We are stardust / Kevin Kelly.