What exactly is ID?

Two points of fact:1. Membranes are made of lipids, not proteins; these do not have the same constituents as proteins unless you mean the individual atoms of which they are composed.
2. Membranes are all water permeable. Aquaporins provide additional control of water flow, but even without them water can cross membranes.

Hi Smooth Operator,Well, I'm completely convinced by your theoretical argument. Now please explain to me why E. coli - which has a generation time measured in days (sometimes even minutes), and does not reproduce sexually - is not extinct due to this disasterous genetic fate you've so neatly outlined?Edited by Mr Jack, : No reason given.

How many generations do you think it needs? E.coli can divide every 20 minutes under ideal conditions, how many twenty minutes are there in the last six thousand years? Even if we drop it to one generation a day to account for variations in generational rates, that's over two million generations.Why hasn't genetic entropy shown its head in E. coli?

Indeed, but I was pointing out that even the Creationists' silly date for the creation of the earth is not free from their problem.

Logic can show all sorts of things if your assumptions are wrong; if your conclusion are demonstrable wrong then it follows your logic is flawed or your assumptions were wrong. Experiment always trumps theory. Then why don't we see any effect of it?Every E. coli bacterium alive today should have accumulated a minimum (using a conservative estimate of the number of generations) of over 7000 deleterious mutations in the last 6000 years. That's more mutations than they have genes.

Cite an example then, please Why would we need to know the initial population size? I'm talking about in a single gene line - as in those descended from a single individual.

Interesting articles, thank you. So given that you are presenting these articles as reliable sources, why should we not accept their further information on the differential effects of population size on deleterious mutation accumulation?(Although, I note, neither of those articles supports your assertion about build up of genetic entropy) We can still know how many will accumulate in a single genetic line (because E. coli is asexual), that number is at least 7000 - more than one mutation per gene. Why aren't they suffering huge consequences from this problem?Edited by Mr Jack, : No reason given.