'Nature does not design life'. Life designs itself, over time, in an iterative process we call Nature. .
Put another way, the phenotypes on display in both the living and fossil record reflect an intelligent process (evolution) dancing with the randomness of circumstance. A snapshot in a given slice of time will reflect instantiations of the process, and should not be interpreted as some ultimate design plan in itself. Those phenotypes contain in them (in us!) the properties of the process rather than the ultimate end-point. There is no final state in evolution; all is circumstantially dependent.
What we call the natural world is a sprawling landscape in which phenotypes are local minima.