I agree that nature doesn't intend anything, but when people say that it does, what they're actually doing is slightly clumsily expressing a very valid concern.

I agree that nature doesn't intend anything, but when people say that it does, what they're actually doing is slightly clumsily expressing a very valid concern. And that concern is that a lot of agricultural science suffers from a dangerous sort of reductionism. We come up with a model for how something grows, and then we assume that anything the model doesn't account for isn't important. (This is actually a general gripe I have about a lot of biological science.) The fact is that plants and animals evolved to give and take as part of enormously complex systems we've hardly begun to understand. I think it's reasonable not to assume that we can scrap those systems, rebuild them from the top down based on what understanding we do have, and not encounter unforeseen consequences.