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DNA sequences are the gospel documents of all life, and we have learned to decipher them.
Of course it is difficult to pin down the precise identity of ancestors, and there is a good case for not even trying to do so. But to make statements that encourage others to conclude that there never were any ancestors is to debauch language and betray truth.
It is not possible to prove that acquired characteristics are never inherited. For the same reason we can never prove that fairies do not exist.
On the other hand, science has amassed a good understanding of how the universe ticks, an understanding that works well for an enormous range of phenomena, and certain allegations would be incompatible, or at least very hard to reconcile, with this understanding.
There is a continuum, from theories that probably are not true but easily could be, to theories that could only be true at the cost of overthrowing large edifices of successful orthodox science.
We can no more imagine acquired characteristics being inherited than we can imagine the following. A cake has one slice cut out of it. A description of the alteration is now fed back into the recipe, and the recipe changes in such a way that the next cake baked according the altered recipe comes out of the oven with one slice already neatly missing.
The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.
The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale. Whatever is the explanation for life, therefore, it cannot be chance. The true explanation for the existence of life must embody the very antithesis of chance. The antithesis of chance is nonrandom survival, properly understood.
