Is there anything to interest a scientist, in considering lilies or ravens?`

What might one be curious about, in thinking about the beauty of lilies or the self-sufficiency of ravens? Is there anything in these topics one might ask some kind of scientist about, even today, even 2000 years after the sayings were said? I suggest three possibilities:

1. It is odd that people find flowers and birds generally beautiful, worth emulating in their own sewing and weaving. Flowers have colors, birds have colors, for reasons that have nothing to do with human beings. We know also, for some such colors, that the eyes they relate to most closely, bee-eyes and bird-eyes, have a different range than human eyes, see a different slice of the spectrum. So, why should natural beauty, natural color schemes, appeal to US? Why shouldn't they be alien schemes, relevant to the worlds of flowers and birds, to their natural audiences? 

2. It is odd that people carefully preserve fabric creations that they think to be greatly inferior to the natural color schemes of flowers. Flowers are thrown away. Dresses are cared for. This isn't quite a human universal. Sometimes, people  venerate the natural object. I think of the Dutch tulip-mania and of the Taoist idea of gongshi, but there is a general tendency, in our own culture, to treat natural objects badly while preserving much less interesting things that have been made. 

3. It is odd that ravens, big, active birds that spend a lot of time socializing, get enough calories to live. It is different with sparrows and robins; they seem to be always eating, and they are small and fairly modest in their movements. But ravens and crows are big and extravagant. There is a more general form of this puzzle: humans in agriculture work a lot. Around them are animals who get enough to eat without sowing and reaping, without fences and barns. When I was growing up, my school taught as obvious that agriculture was a great leap forward for humans, allowing leisure. Thirty years later, I read people who suggested that  hunter-gatherers were pretty well nourished on about five hours a day of work, that the little neolithic bands were paradise compared to the agricultural compounds that succeeded them. That is a thought not so distant from the remark about ravens: couldn't there be a more natural, less effortful way for people to get their livelihood? It seems like agriculture is a pretty complicated way to get what birds somehow manage to get without much fuss - and they still have time for complicated raven-behavior, some of them.

I am not saying that Jesus had any of these thoughts. But I want to combat a tendency in the interpretation of sayings: to see them as referring to well understood, un-problematic phenomena that are then used to make a point. The implicit idea is that there is nothing in lilies or sheep or lost coins that would create a stop in the mind of a smart person, a kind of mental beaver dam. That then leads to the habit of immediately rushing from the  image to some bit of advice. I think we have to always ask, when a thing comes up in a saying of Jesus: how intrinsically interesting is that thing?