Sorry I don’t buy that for one second. The exact words on Behe’s slide which he read were
“The Bacterial Flagellum: More than 20 years after Darwin’s Black Box there has not been even an attempt to explain it in Darwinian terms. It remains at utter mystery”
That is a flat out lie, no two ways about it. Beside the well known Nic Matzke paper in Nature From The Origin of Species to the origin of bacterial flagella there have been around 600 published papers on the evolution of all parts of the flagellum.
Here is an overview of a 2018 paper
Biologists Trace Evolution of Bacterial Flagellar Motors
Like human-made motors, these nanoscale machines have distinct ‘stator’ and ‘rotor’ components that spin against each other. The structure of these motors determines their power and the bacteria’s swimming ability.
Previously, Imperial College researcher Morgan Beeby and co-authors looked at these motors and discovered a key factor that determined how strongly bacteria could swim.
They found that the more stator structures the bacterial motor possessed, the larger its turning force, and the stronger the bacterium swam.
Despite these differences, DNA sequence analysis shows that the core motors are ancestrally related. This led the team to question how structure and swimming diversity evolved from the same core design.
Now, in new research published in the journal Scientific Reports , Dr. Beeby’s team was able to build a ‘family tree’ of bacterial motors by combining 3D imaging with DNA analysis.
This allowed them to understand what ancestral motors may have looked like, and how they could have evolved into the sophisticated motors seen today.
The scientists found a clear difference between the motors of primitive and sophisticated bacterial species. While many primitive species had around 12 stators, more sophisticated species had around 17 stators. This, together with DNA analysis, suggested that ancient motors may also have only had 12 stators.
“This clear separation between primitive and sophisticated species represents a ‘quantum leap’ in evolution,” the authors said.
“Our study reveals that the increase in motor power capacity is likely the result of existing structures fusing. This forms a structural scaffold to incorporate more stators, which combine to drive rotation with higher force.”
When Behe barfed up that lie I would have loved to see Dr. S drop a big pile of science journals with flagellar evolution research in front of Behe just like happened to him at Dover. 