Nature's Designs

The BBC has a couple of short one to two minute videos that point, each in a different way, to intelligent design in nature.

The first video explains how the morphology and effectiveness of the beak of a bird called the kingfisher attracted the attention of Japanese engineers trying to solve a problem with their bullet trains. The fact that nature's designs solve human engineering problems is at least suggestive of something more than random chance and blind forces behind those designs.

Kingfisher

The second video illustrates what might be called supererogatory design, i.e. designed systems in nature that certainly give the appearance of being both unnecessarily elaborate and intentional. The video shows the amazing underground communication system employed by trees that allows them to assist as well as wage "war" on each other.

It's fascinating to be sure, but the question that comes to mind is how such a system would arise simply through undirected, mechanistic processes.

This is not to say that it couldn't have, of course. Such a feat is within the realm of the logically possible, but it seems that very nearly every new discovery in the biological and cosmological sciences is more compatible with the hypothesis that the mind of an intelligent engineer is behind the phenomena we see than that these phenomena are all, in their billions and perhaps trillions of examples, just a lucky coincidence.

In fact, the conclusion that there's a mind responsible for it all would seem to be almost psychologically inescapable unless that conclusion were rejected a priori, but what rational grounds are there for ruling out an explanation just because one doesn't like its metaphysical implications?

Thanks to Evolution News for the tip and photo.