[Warning: this question is motivated by a prominent proponent of "intelligent design": Prof. Michael Behe. I'm not interested in debating creationism.]
According to Wikipedia:
In Darwin’s Black Box (Behe 1996) I claimed that the bacterial flagellum was irreducibly complex and so required deliberate intelligent design. The flip side of this claim is that the flagellum can’t be produced by natural selection acting on random mutation, or any other unintelligent process. To falsify such a claim, a scientist could go into the laboratory, place a bacterial species lacking a flagellum under some selective pressure (for mobility, say), grow it for ten thousand generations, and see if a flagellum--or any equally complex system--was produced. If that happened, my claims would be neatly disproven.
As far as I can tell, nobody has actually performed this experiment (although, my literature search was not comprehensive, so it is possible I simply haven't found the appropriate publications). [However, there are arguments that the flagellum could have (or likely has) evolved from the type III secretory system, which shows similarity.] This state of affairs strikes me as peculiar -- Behe's proposal sounds like an interesting experiment to perform (even disregarding any external debate).
Question: Is the experiment proposed by Behe (or another experiment in the same spirit) plausible to implement in a laboratory experiment?
Experiments reproducing steps in evolution seem to turn out much easier than I would have expected a priori, e.g. reproductive isolation of fruit flies, experimental evolution of multicellularity, so perhaps Behe's experiment would also be surprisingly easy to implement.
Blocker A, Komoriya K, Aizawa S-I. 2003. Type III secretion systems and bacterial flagella: insights into their function from structural similarities. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 100: 3027–30.