[AndrewC]

There are only so many ways for things to be related to each other, no matter how hard you hammer away at them, and none of those potential relationships do much for the irreducible complexity of the flagellum.

Of what use is a hypodermic if you have nothing to use it on?

The sequence of events appears to be

1. Things weren't
2. Things were.
3. Things were not self-propelled.
4. Things were self-propelled.
5. Things lived in things.
6. Things injected things.

I think that sums up the TTSS story.

[general_re]

The sequence of events appears to be...

What difference does it make? Dembski would have you believe that the only way to disprove the irreducible complexity of the flagellum is to show, in great detail, the exact evolutionary pathway that created it. But why on earth would I bother with that? The TTSS is a perfectly functional subsystem of the flagellum, meaning that I can obviously take parts away the flagellum and have a useful structure left over, which I'm not supposed to be able to do if the flagellum is really irreducibly complex. Whether the TTSS came from the flagellum or vice versa really doesn't matter at all - one is a functional subset of the other, where the other isn't supposed to have functional subsets, by the very definition of "irreducibly complex".