It's a colloquialism at this point. Nature also abhors a vacuum, goes toe to toe with Nurture, and is a mother herself.

Now I'm imagining Nature as a single mom who likes to decorate her apartment with hexagons, never vacuums, and occasionally invites Nurture to sleep over.

I understand the concern, but this concern misses the nuance of what 'nature prefers' means.

You may have a more spiritualistic view of "intentionality" than is really warranted.

Or they, like me, have constant interactions with lay people who constantly understand these things to mean their view of a universe guided by an intelligence is correct.

I get it, it's just hard to avoid in English, but it is still a (small) failure in clear science communication.

I hate to break it to you but they are going to select for their own bias regardless.

I think the worst case of this in science is the way that evolution is described in a way that implies an active process rather than just random mutations which may or may not make organisms more fit for survival.

Yeah, I think that's the most common one. Strongly connected with the idea that evolution is "improvement" or some kind of step along a road to being "better", which I've seen trip up a lot of people who normally don't get confused about this kind of thing.

This reminds me of a thing a comedian said, or at least that's where I heard it first.

"also told you we're descended from apes ... you lot might be, I'm ascended from the apes" - Steve Hughes[1]

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYk5k-vL_Ek#t=1m50s -- caution, course language

Rather, a large number of laypeople seem to have this more spiritualistic view, and it is fairly obvious how they will interpret this kind of language.

I agree, it makes the reader think the bee has some kind of foresight in the building process, like "hmm. here's my options, and I greatly prefer to build hexagons!"

It's not really their choice to prefer it. It's what works best and thus bees are programmed to do. Imagine an alien reading the headline "Why humans prefer sleeping prone"

Hexagons are what you get when you squish a lot of semi-rigid round things together. It's not like the bees are designing hexagons - look at the cells on the free edges of a comb and you'll see little in the way of sharp hex-ey corners

it's hard to say what "designing" means - is a box-packing algorithm "designing" the packing pattern when it runs? Or is it just following a series of algorithmic steps "blindly" and yet, being able to reach an outcome that has certain properties (like being very densely packed)?

I think I saw that article on a Minbari news site, right next to "The 11 Most Meditative Vacation Spots in the Earth Alliance".