structural:scholar_edition, structural:reformatting, linguistic:paraphrasing
Flagella and the intelligent design debate

Some authors have argued that flagella cannot have evolved, assuming that they can only function properly when all proteins are in place. In other words, the flagellar apparatus is " irreducibly complex ". However, many proteins can be deleted or mutated and the flagellum still works, though sometimes at reduced efficiency. Moreover, with many proteins unique to some number across species, diversity of bacterial flagella composition was higher than expected. Hence, the flagellar apparatus is clearly very flexible in evolutionary terms and perfectly able to lose or gain protein components. For instance, a number of mutations have been found that increase the motility of E. coli. Additional evidence for the evolution of bacterial flagella includes the existence of vestigial flagella, intermediate forms of flagella and patterns of similarities among flagellar protein sequences, including the observation that almost all of the core flagellar proteins have known homologies with non-flagellar proteins. Furthermore, several processes have been identified as playing important roles in flagellar evolution, including self-assembly of simple repeating subunits, gene duplication with subsequent divergence, recruitment of elements from other systems ('molecular bricolage') and recombination.