Bacterial Flagellum

One of the fastest races you can watch is a top fuel dragster race, typically lasting under 4 seconds. These are high performance vehicles; their parts and components have been evolved over the years by engineers to become faster and faster. In 2016, pilot Terry McMillen’s dragster exploded and completely obliterated itself on the racetrack when a single component (a restraint plate) failed.

Did you know that an even more sophisticated engine exists and, if you believe in evolutionary theory, was developed hundreds of millions of years before top fuel dragsters existed? Here are the specs¹:

• The actual motor is similar to an electric motor containing a drive shaft, universal joint, bushings/bearings, rotor, stator and a propeller.
• Water-cooled rotary engine
• Proton motive-force drive system
• Forward and reverse gears
• Capable of self assembly and self-repair
• Hard-wired signal-transduction system with short-term memory

Wow, pretty sweet ride, eh? So, what’s the name of this engine? The bacterial flagellum. Some bacteria (Vibro cholerae bacteria) are capable of going 100 body lengths per second²!  It is the equivalent to a human running 400 miles an hour! Which is 65 miles an hour faster than Top Fuel Car’s max speed.

But according to evolutionary theory, it is believed that each component of this biological motor evolved randomly one at a time until it formed a high-performance engine by chance. McMillen’s dragster had a purposefully designed high-performance engine and still failed catastrophically when a single component was under engineered.

As humans, we can recognize when a machine is purposefully designed but suspend that belief for a machine in the biological world.

Remember Romans 1:20: “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.”

1 . DeVowe, Steven. “The Amazing Motorized Germ.” Creation.com, Creation Ministries International, 13 Apr. 2016, https://creation.com/the-amazing-motorized-germ. Accessed Feb 22, 2022.

2. Kojima, S., Yamamoto, K., Kawagishi, I. & Homma, M. The polar flagellar motor of Vibrio cholerae is driven by an Na+ motive force. J. Bacteriol. 181, 1927–1930 (1999).