"b_sharp seemed to find it on his own. Perhaps you can too. It's not my responsibility to read stuff for you, read it to you, or bring you milk and cookies. "
What I found was Sewell's book. I do not believe it is a text book, at least I hope not, the appendix the article this thread is based on is so full of errors and misses so much relevant information as to be useless even as a casual read.
"Of course in the narrowest sense ToE, by virtue of the mechanism of natural selection, presupposes life, and only operates on life, but evolution in the more generally accepted, though arguably more slack, understanding of the term, certainly assumes a gradualist and Naturalist theory of abiogenesis"
Sewell's article is supposed to be a science based piece, what is he doing using common definitions unless he needs the room to set up strawmen? The reason we can't argue abiogenesis within evolution is because it may or may not use the same mechanisms as evolution. If it turns out that life results from evolutionary mechanisms acting on pre-life then we can include it in the debate. We haven't reached that point yet.
"Also, tell me exactly what is the most primitive form of life necessary for ToE to operate? Are we talking protein? amino acids? Nucleotide? Enzyme? RNA? DNA? Complete unicellular organism? At what point do we hand things off to Darwin?
We don't know yet. Bacteria certainly. Virii almost positively. Prions, I'm unsure. Nanobes, that is not known.
Book publishing decisions are based entirely on the prospects of making money (or of being paid by the author).
Lunatic science books frequently sell well.
If it is used as a textbook, is the school by any chance Bob Jones University.