Nanoscience has reinforced this recognition. Nature's palette ranges from the strictly geometrical – the marine radiolarians (minute Buckminster Fuller domes, or footballs if you prefer) made famous in art by Ernst Haeckel in the 19th century – to the ragged, as in the fractal beauty of trees, coral reefs and so on. So nature is not a naturalistic artist and a Heliconius butterfly, with its wings splashed with the colours of jazz, could be the Matisse of the lepidopteral realm.

Darwin was acutely aware of this and admired the modelling of the ocelli on the argus pheasant tail feathers as 'more like a work of art than of nature'. Except when practising mimicry and camouflage (Rothenberg has an excellent chapter on these) nature is not copying anything: it just is – a vast pattern book of original designs. Orchids, humminbirds, the peacock's tail have a beauty of form, pattern and colour that artists struggle to match – and these are abstract designs. But in the intervening 150 years a false dichotomy has grown up around nature, naturalistic art and abstract painting. Endless Forms, the 2009 Darwin exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, showed how biology in the 19th century helped to pave the way for the artistic revolutions that followed, an idea enthusiastically endorsed by David Rothenberg. S omething is stirring in art and science that could have major consequences for our whole culture.

Useless beauty analysis