Stepwise formation of the bacterial flagellar system

Uh oh. It looks like the coffin of one of ID's major claims, that the bacterial flagella is a non-evolvable machine, just acquired another nail.

We already had Matzke's Evolution in (Brownian) space: a model for the origin of the bacterial flagellum, and now a paper entitled "Stepwise formation of bacterial flagella" was just published today--the 16th of April.
The full text is available at the link, but here are a few relevant snippets:

The gene clusters encoding the components of the flagellum
can include >50 genes, but these clusters vary greatly in their
numbers and contents among bacterial phyla. To investigate how
this diversity arose, we identified all homologs of all flagellar
proteins encoded in the complete genome sequences of 41 flagellated
species from 11 bacterial phyla. Based on the phylogenetic
occurrence and histories of each of these proteins, we could
distinguish an ancient core set of 24 structural genes that were
present in the common ancestor to all Bacteria. Within a genome,
many of these core genes show sequence similarity only to other
flagellar core genes, indicating that they were derived from one
another, and the relationships among these genes suggest the
probable order in which the structural components of the bacterial
flagellum arose. These results show that core components of the
bacterial flagellum originated through the successive duplication
and modification of a few, or perhaps even a single, precursor
gene.

Our results show that flagellum originated very early, before the diversification of
contemporary bacterial phyla, and evolved in a stepwise fashion
through a series of gene duplication, loss and transfer events.

-hat tip to the Evilutionary Biologist.

UPDATE: Apparently, the paper isn't as rosy as it seems. Nick Matzke critiques it here.