Something is stirring in art and science that could have major consequences for our whole culture. 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. But in the intervening 150 years a false dichotomy has grown up around nature, naturalistic art and abstract painting. Orchids, humminbirds, the peacock's tail have a beauty of form, pattern and colour that artists struggle to match  and these are abstract designs. 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. 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".

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. 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.

Nanoscience has reinforced this recognition. Nature at the nano level doesn't look like anything Constable would recognise, but more like contemporary high technology and architecture. So the nature/technology antithesis breaks down in the face of the new science and technology.

Darwin is not the only progenitor of the new movement and Rothenberg, in his immensely fertile new book, hails the pioneers such as Haeckel and D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, the great Scottish polymath who showed how the growth of horns and spirals and the radiolarians' mineral skeletons follow mathematical patterns of growth, and cites much recent work in which art and science are becoming more natural collaborators.

Rothenberg has excellent credentials: he is a jazz musician and a professor of philosophy and music who has specialised in bringing natural sounds  bird and whale song  into the ambit of jazz. In the visual realm he has an innocent eye for the telling image, irrespective of provenance. Some of the artist heroes of his book are the bowerbirds, nature's Andy Goldsworthys, who assemble glittering objects (colour-coded according to species) in their twiggy courting bowers, and the squid and octopus that have a vast repertoire of colour patterns they can control either for camouflage or startling visual displays.

I have only one quibble with this book. Rothenberg writes passionately and engagingly, but in one chapter he allows too much space to the verbatim discourse of evolutionary biologist Richard Prum. Prum's work is clearly relevant but his garrulous ramblings break the finely tuned spell that Rothenberg weaves.

The new art/science espoused by Rothenberg turns some traditional attitudes on their head. There is a deep strand of thought that claims that science destroys beauty by analysing  it atomises, dissects, reduces; it "unweaves the rainbow" by splitting it into mere wavelengths of light. Very many familiar figures have created this "unwoven" braid, with Blake and Keats at their head. Richard Dawkins tried to address this attack head-on by calling one of his books Unweaving the Rainbow. The Dawkins line is that science adds to our feelings about beauty in nature. The new thought, though, locates beauty in the science of nature. While mainstream artists regarded beauty as more or less taboo for decades, it was science that showed how the beauty of patterns emerges from mathematics and evolutionary biology. This isn't science as an optional add-on to art, it is more like a takeover bid. Scientists don't have the raft of inhibitions that prevent many artists declaring that beauty matters, but Rothenberg, an artist empowered by science, has no qualms in asserting that "an engagement with art is fundamentally an engagement with beauty, even if it is a strange or unfamiliar beauty".

A running debate in the book is the question of whether patterns in nature are defined by physics and chemistry or are they whimsical, frozen accidents of evolution? All that useless beauty. But is it really useless? Ah, answering that question brings the evolutionary biologists in their adaptationist straitjackets running across the fields, as Larkin might have put it, had he been remotely interested in such matters. There are some biologists who insist that every single mark on a creature is there because it serves some evolutionary advantage. But the beautiful patterns that stud Rothenberg's book exemplify Darwin's other theory: sexual selection. The peacock has its gorgeous tail because females have preferred them over very many generations. It is a liability in strict natural selection terms, though obviously not enough of one to consign it to oblivion. Sexual selection is to some extent a closed system. This idea has been dramatically reinforced by recent work on those Matissean Heliconius butterflies which shows that the genes for patterns are linked to genes for a preference for that pattern in mate choice. Of course, all these patterns do have to submit to the rigour of survival by natural selection. But natural selection may not always, to borrow a Doctor Johnsonism, "number the streaks on the tulip".

And this is the triumphant lesson of Survival of the Beautiful: nature is not entirely red in tooth and claw, it also allows the beautiful right of passage. In the perennial war between the aesthetes and the hearties, the hearties do not always win.

 Peter Forbes's Dazzled and Deceived: Mimicry and Camouflage is published by Yale.