evolution - Is Behe's experiment (evolving the bacterial flagellum) plausible in the lab?

You may be interested in this paper and a video that summarizes it. It seems to be made quite clear that 1) effectively all of the parts of the flagellum are not original to it, and 2) there is a reasonable evolutionary path (one involving only increment/refine steps) that could have been responsible for it.

The video mentions but doesn't describe experiments that were in support of the proposed model. I assume they might involve refinement or statistical issues of the environment, not the whole-thing-at-once as Behe outlines. Obviously, if you can show that each step is independently adaptive, then the whole chain is shown to be possible evolutionarily, without trying to set up an experiment where you win the lottery n times simultaneously.

Personally I think the fact that the most awesome thing about the flagellum -- the rotation -- already exists in ATP synthase steals a lot of the flagellum's thunder. :)

Edit (Douglas S. Stones): Following the above references led me to this paper:

M.J. Pallen, N.J. Matzke "From The Origin of Species to the origin of bacterial flagella" Nature Reviews Microbiology 4 (2006), 784-790. (pdf)

In this article the authors discuss the possibility of designing a lab experiment to reproduce (steps of) the evolution of the flagellum.

Scott Minnich speculated in his testimony that studies on flagellar
evolution need not be restricted to sequence analysis or theoretical
models, but that instead this topic could become the subject of
laboratory-based experimental studies. But obviously, one cannot
model millions of years of evolution in a few weeks or months.

So how
might such studies be conducted? One option might be to look back in
time. It is feasible to use phylogenetic analyses to reconstruct
plausible ancestral sequences of modern-day proteins, and then
synthesize and investigate these ancestral proteins. Proof of
principle for this approach has already been demonstrated on several
NF proteins[69–75]. Similar studies could recreate plausible ancestors
for various flagellar components (for example, the common ancestor of
flagellins and HAP3 proteins). These proteins could then be reproduced
in the laboratory in order to examine their properties (for example,
how well they self-assemble into filaments and what those filaments
look like).

An alternative, more radical, option would be to model
flagellar evolution prospectively, for example, by creating random or
minimally constrained libraries and then iteratively selecting
proteins that assemble into ever more sophisticated artificial
analogues of the flagellar filament.

Another experimental option might
be to investigate the environmental conditions that favour or
disfavour bacterial motility. The fundamental physics involved
(diffusion due to Brownian motion) is mathematically tractable, and
has already been used to predict, for example, that powered motility
is useless in very small bacteria[76,77].

[For readability, I've added some line breaks to the above. There's too many cited references to list them all.]