Bacterial flagellum

I have a question. Why do you believe that the reaon you were not taught about it has anything to do with evolution ? Schools have to teach the basics - although I studied physics at school we never covered even Special Relativity - let alone General Relativity of Quantum Mechanics.One point to remember about the flagellum is that it has been around for a long time and we cannot hope to gain any significant information from the fossil record. Given that and the complexity of the system it is going to be very hard to work out it's evolution.If we are attributing ulterior motives would it not be reasonable to say that Behe intentionally chose a system where information on its history would be hard to obtain ?
If you find that objectionable then I would suggest that you display a little more charity in inferring other's motives.

What do you mean that they taught you about the "inner workings of the atom" ? Did they teach you the probability density functions describing the position of electrons ? How much did they teach you about Quarks ? Or the w and z particles ?Relativity doesn't go against evolution - but you weren't taught that, were you ?And why should our not knowing how a particular system evolved - when there is virtually no direct evidence (all we have is modern organisms greatly removed from the organisms who evolved flagella) - be a serious problem for the truth of evolution anyway ?Now I do suspect that Behe may have deliberately chosen to look at systems where the available evidence was very limited. After all if you are making an argument from ignorance then you want to look at systems we don't know too much about. But I won't say that that is what he did - even though I've got a better case than you have - because that case still isn't good enough.This paper - currently unpublished - proposes an explanation of how a flagellum could have evolved
Evolution in (Brownian) space: a model for the origin of the bacterial flagellumDo you think that you could have handled that in school ?

There are plenty of systems you could choose to argue about - the flagellum isn't a special problem.THere are many things that could have bene mentioned in your biology lessosn but weren't. You still haven't offered any reason to think that there was any ulterior motive to not discussing the flagellum (or rather ONE sort of flagellum - there are at least two distinct types, with many variations). If you are trying to be open minded then I seriously suggest that you look at the prejudice and hostility underlying your idea that there is any sort of "cover-up" going on.And if you don't know who Behe is - he's the onne who started the whole thing of using the flagellum as an argument against evolution. But I'm still waiting for someone to explain why it should be easy to work out complex histories without some direct evidence. I would think that someone trying to be open-minded would consider that side of things, too.

Well there are many variations on just the bacterial flagellum Behe talks about, which itself shows evolution.This is the abstract for a paper describing the flagellum used by archaea
The archaeal flagellum: a different kind of prokaryotic motility structure.
This page links to a full paper which may be downloaded in pdf format
The archaeal flagellum: a unique motility structure.EvoWiki has an introduction to different sorts of flagella here
Flagella
which tells me that I missed the fact that eukaryotic bacteria have yet another sort of flagellum. It also notes that some bacteria use a different "engine" (using sodium ions instead of hydrogen ions).I'm not aware of any macroscopic structures that use the same mechanisms and I'm not sure that I would expect them - what works at the molecular level doesn't necessarily scale up well.

According to the Wikipedia entry the "motor" can manage 6-17,000 rpm but usually only does 100-200 rpm when the whip is actually attached.The efficiency figure appears to refer to the "motor" alone - Page not found | American Institute of Physics makes that claim. But the efficiency of the flagellum as a whole is much lower - according to this page 9.4.2.4 the efficiency of the flagellum to actually propel the bacteria is at best in the range 10-28% - nowhere near 100%. In fact it may well be as low as 1% as mentioned in the previous link and in this one:
http://brodylab.eng.uci.edu/...rody/reynolds/lowpurcell.html

I suggest that if you want to distinguish between the "motor" and the flagellum as a whole you make it clear.