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\"Beauty is truth, truth beauty\", or so said Keats. Historians of science are adept at understanding the complexities involved in translating natural phenomena into fact, and fact into truth. At the same time, historians of art have demonstrated that beauty is culturally constructed, and what looks \"right\" has changed based on time, place, and historical context. However, these perspectives have rarely been brought together, and little critical attention has been paid to the role of beauty in shaping expectations of what the truth looks like. As a result, there is little recognition of how standards of beauty, shaped by Western expectations, have constrained what scientists recognized as possible truths.This project addresses how aesthetic judgements of beauty came to be valued, and simultaneously made invisible, in the construction of knowledge in the life and human sciences in British and American contexts between 1850 and 1920. In particular, it identifies an influential conversation about organic form that was shared between morphology, anthropology, and design, which trained the eyes of artists and scientists to discern not only what was important, but what was beautiful, natural, and preferable.I examine texts, images, and objects produced by scientists and artists engaged in the study of organic form, including design treatises, studies of pattern and ornament, collections of natural specimens, and museum displays.Chapter 1 introduces the project. Chapter 2, \"The Discerning Eye\", argues that, due to activities of British design reformers in the 1840s and 1850s, good taste became synonymous with the recognition of the \"cosmological\" beauty embedded in nature through God's design. This kind of beauty was rule-bound and axiomatic, and because of its roots in Christian cosmology, it wielded moral authority that acted as a guide to truth. When evolutionary explanations of organic form replaced divine ones in the 1860s and 1870s, good taste became tethered to status and cultivation.Chapter 3, \"Tracing the Spiral Path of the Nautilus Shell\", tells the story of a compelling but enigmatic organism at the center of discussions about beauty, design, and evolution: the chambered nautilus, or Nautilus pompilius. The shell's expanding spiral pattern shaped the stories told about the organism, and obscured the challenges of actual nautilus research, such as the treacherous and unsuccessful expedition to collect nautilus embryos in Melanesia undertaken in the 1890s by Arthur Willey. Focusing on the pattern of the shell, rather than on the messy details, not only enabled abstraction and decontextualization, but also suggested a triumphant narrative arc, and a promise that nature follows a plan.Chapter 4, \"The Zigzag and the Evolution of Decorative Art\", examines a group of anthropologists, including Alfred Cort Haddon and Henry Balfour, who attempted to explain the decorative arts of non-Western people as products of biological evolution in the 1880s and 1890s. These anthropologists denied aesthetic preferences to the people they studied, while simultaneously using their own aesthetic judgment—and the authority of science—to classify and arrange collections into evolutionary stories.Chapter 5, \"Taste and Civilization in 'The Yellow Wall-Paper'\" uses Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1896 short story to identify what was at stake in using the right kind of beauty in the home. Through a new reading of this famous story, I demonstrate how Gilman considered design to be a tool for the realization of the ideals of progressive science.Chapter 6, \"Symmetry\", chronicles how scientists, including D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, embraced the elegant beauty of symmetry as a guide in the search for nature's laws in the early twentieth century. For Thompson and others, symmetry had the potential to be both a universal force and an epistemic methodology.A short epilogue connects this history to the emergence of algorithmic pattern recognition in the mid-twentieth century.Through this study, I argue that two groups of aspiring elites—life scientists and designers—borrowed from the authority of the other to argue for the value of their own expertise in interpreting organic form. Both sought to protect taste, and the discernment of patterns, as an attribute of erudition, civilization, and morality. Therefore, what we would now recognize as aesthetic preferences were made invisible, because they were treated as foundational and axiomatic. Since taste was a product of cultivation, and seen as a result of one's position in civilization, scientists denied taste to non-Western people and non-human animals. While all humans might be able to discern order, only those with the discerning eye could interpret what that order meant. This fundamentally limited the available \"truths\" that these specialists could recognize.