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by falcor84 426 days ago
Plants in general have much larger genomes than animals, and that's clearly a definition of complexity.
1 comments

That just means they have less selective pressure to reduce it - possibly because they are simpler. Genome size isn't correlated much without complexity. Obviously it provides an upper bound, but a lot of genes are repeats.
Yes. You'll find that plants generally survive better after being irradiated, indicating that a lot of these genes are apparently not important.
Large software systems also often have significant chunks of code that is only historical and/or "accidental complexity" and can be removed. But we would typically say that removing it is reducing the system's complexity, rather than that it wasn't complex.
Genes are not maintained by people