There is decision making in nature and there is creativity in the biodiversity of life. Proteins that produce materials and how it rearranges those ingredients to produce different outcomes in the phenotype is being creative. From scales to skin like ours and every variation in between is the same as a chemist in a lab experimenting with different chemicals to produce different outcomes.
There are natural laws in nature in that while prokaryotes are allowed the freedom of HGT between themselves, this is prevented in eukaryotes that have a nucleus that prevents us from HGT from swapping with other eukaryotes.
If this restriction was not in place we could obtain every trait that is unique in other creatures and become superhumans with all the advantages combined in nature in one being.
If breeding barriers were not in place and we could reproduce with any other creature on the planet what do you think would eventually happen?
The food web would never work if we did not have a nucleus that prevents HGT and if all creatures did not have reproduction barriers. The DNA pool would end up producing one super creature competing with other super creatures that all looked like each other.
A catastrophic scenario that would have prevented life in the beginning if decision making was not employed at different forks in the road. We have a tree with branches that supports different alternatives that separates us into groups.
The food web can only be successful since its origin in the way it was designed with natural laws in place. You have to be a total idiot if you can't observe this in nature.
Chemical reactions alone cannot produce all of the biota today and if it did everything would look the same without imagination in its creatures appearance or specific features that make them unique.
This planet sustains life through recycling the elements by chemical conversions and this is an automated process from single celled organisms to humans in order to be considered "alive". The creativity in appearance in each phenotype is represented by the imagination of a unknown mechanism using the same principle of recycling is evident in all creatures.
The food web uses a predator/prey method that allows the recycling of life to continue is evidence of collective intelligence that makes it successful. The fact that life forms are viewed as "put together just good enough" and not perfected in design is reasoned by: Why would you spend time on perfecting the critters form if its only going to end up on the dinner menu of another critter?
The idea that they are made good enough to reproduce offspring is the goal of a successful food web. Looking at the whole picture of life does reveal there is a method to this madness. Black and white concepts do not exist in reality. Evolution that insists nothing is directed while religion is the opposite is a black and white bias way of thinking. Leave out their titles and its illusion of how it is defined and the similarities are evident in both sides of the debate.