The Bacterial Flagellum: Evolution's Nightmare & Demise

Dr Michael Behe (author of "Darwin's Black Box" & proponent of ID) popularized the term irreducible complexity to describe features in life which are complex and yet their function can not be reduced without destroying the primary function and usefulness of the system/function to the host organism. In the case seen in the video, the bacterial flagellum has approximately 40 finely matched protein parts that must all be in place for the bacterial flagellum (w/ motor) to work. Furthermore, the assembly process of this motor is one of the key overlooked aspects of the problem of this systems development - ie. even the assembly program/process is arguably irreducibly complex. So, not only does a bacteria need to have the DNA coded for the correct proteins, the whole cell has to 'know' WHERE to put each protein part and WHEN to put it there. This is an astronomically improbable task to achieve through random fortuitous increases in instruction sequences (which to this day remains purely hypothetical - ie. imaginary) and parts specifications - consider the relative size of the cell surface area to the size of the bacterial flagellum and the chances each molecular part will assemble in the correct location & with the correct timing for assembly. So, the whole machine and the ORDER or sequence of system assembly is critical to success! If the whole universe were a fishbowl like earth's oceans - except fully teeming with bacteria - for 15 billion years, there would still be insufficient probabilistic resources to accomplish the feat of building up such a comparable system even once. It's no wonder that ID theory is so satisfying to the many open minded scientists it has attracted.