The other component of evolution besides variation is heredity, i.e. those beneficial variations are inherited by future generations as the means of adaptation. According to Duhring, Darwin was wrong, here, too. He claims that Darwin had argued that all life evolved from one ancestor. In fact, Darwin said no such thing. Engels notes,
“Darwin expressly says on the last page but one of his Origin of species, sixth edition, that he regards
“all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings”.
Haeckel even goes considerably further, assuming
“a quite independent stock for the vegetable kingdom, a second for the animal kingdom”, and between the two “a number of independent stocks of protista, each of which, quite independently of the former, has developed out of one special archegone of the moneron type” (Schöpfungsgeschichte, p. 397)” (p 90-91)
For Duhring, claiming that Darwin had proposed this evolution from one primordial being has the advantage that he can, again, use the argument of the chicken and egg, of where did this original being come from? Even assuming not some primordial Adam, but a “few beings”, as actually argued by Darwin, or a separate stock of plant and animal beings as proposed by Haeckel, the question of chicken and egg, of how this organic life came into existence, before any process of evolution can occur, still arises.
“This primordial being was only invented by Dühring in order to bring it into as great disrepute as possible by drawing a parallel with the original Jew Adam, and in this he — that is to say, Herr Dühring — has the bad luck to be ignorant of the fact that [George] Smith's Assyrian discoveries have shown that this original Jew emerged from the chrysalis of the original Semite, and that the whole biblical history of the creation and the flood turns out to be a fragment of the old cycle of heathen religious myths which the Jews have in common with the Babylonians, Chaldeans and Assyrians.” (p 91)
As Engels notes, Duhring is quite right that Darwin's theory of evolution cannot extend back to the point prior to this primordial being or beings. But, that does not invalidate it as a theory of evolution of organic life. It was limited by the state of knowledge of science in general, at that time. Since then, science has developed a greater understanding of organic chemistry, of the role of amino acids, proteins, DNA and RNA. It has shown that these basic chemical elements were present on the Earth, and has been able to reproduce, in the laboratory, the means by which they can combine to form the building blocks of life.
The first forms of such life are single-celled organisms, and they posed a problem for the theory of evolution, because, without cell division, there can be no development of multi-cellular organisms and so no process of adaptation. However, recent theories have proposed that, much as with viruses that invade other cells and destroy them, such an organism must have invaded another single-celled organism, but, rather than destroying it, merged with it, creating a process of cell division, and the creation of multi-cellular organisms.
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