From physics to ecology, one formidable goal of scientific exploration is determining the forces at work in nature and how these forces organize our world. In trying to uncover simple laws, scientists must balance the accuracy and complexity necessary to describe essential mechanisms. Sir Isaac Newton's laws of motion were sufficient for almost 200 years, but Einstein's addition of a fourth dimension of space-time was justifiable because it not only increased the accuracy and complexity of understanding but also moved physics past a descriptive stage. Understanding the patterns of biodiversity in a tropical forest or a coral reef, however, has had ecologists mired in the multiple dimensions of natural laws to simply describe how species survive and co-exist. Distilling this complexity to the essential drivers of species assemblages will not only help ecology meet its most daunting conservation challenge—staving biodiversity loss—but also help move the science into a predictive stage.