Baroque Botany: Elaborate but Functional

In the documentary Biology of the Baroque, Michael Denton considers the challenge to Darwinian explanations of "biological features that may be adaptive, but they appear to be far beyond what is needed for mere survival." The film explores numerous examples that are "completely outside the domain of natural selection" because they emerge without ancestors, are gratuitously complex, and would have had no adaptive value even if ancestors were known. A good example is flowering plants.

The orig...