I don't know or care what other people's motives are.
I am more interested in correcting the misunderstandings surrounding Darwin and Yockey than I am in punishing a simple misquote. What I'm trying to correct is the reasoning that lead to the misquote.
As I see it there is a fatally flawed syllogism involved.
1. Common descent requires that each generation be the offspring of a previous generation.
2. Therefore there could not be a first generation.
Something is simply wrong with this. I can't quite figure out how it could be uttered, so I can't classify it.
But for the record, Darwin proposed two possible scenarios for the origin of the first generation: one involved a deity, and the second involved a "warm pond" and chemicals. Both are life from non-life. I am not aware of any school of thought holding that life is an infinite regress.
At the risk of assigning motives, I have to speculate that the "warm pond" conjecture is the one most objected to by evolution critics. But Darwin was quite clear that the origin of life problem is unrelated to the question of how life behaves once it exists. Either conjecture is consistent with common descent.
I think it's the unspoken assumptions. These are that little change will have occurred from one generation to another far removed generation, and that all generations must be "alive" in a sense that is not properly defined and reasoned.
Additionally it actually goes against the "first mover" argument for the existence for God, which argued that something had to have started things because the universe could not go infinitely back in time, but must have had a beginning. How can this be used to argue for the existence of God and then the opposite used to argue for the impossibility of abiogenesis?
Are there other possibilities? The idea of "conditions" may also be considered separate from the origin event. (Like bringing two people together before they can fall in love) Such conditions assume the cooperation of homogeneous and heterogeneous causes
IIRC, this occurs in a private letter and not in his published work. This would very strongly indicate that he did not feel the subject important to his theory.
I've read On the Origin of Species (6th edition, the one included in the Great Books of the Western World collection) and The Descent of Man (which happens to be bound with it). His style is intellectual honesty to the core--and the very opposite of that of his critics. He tells you what he thinks and why he thinks so. He retraces every bit of his own self-checking, anticipating as many objections as possible to his own ideas and then answering them. He's sharing the adventure of how he arrived at his theory. He's really laying out that he's tried to make sure of his result. "I thought of THIS, but it's not a problem for this reason. I thought of THAT, but it's not a problem because ..."
If it needed to be addressed, if it were important to anything, some discussion of abiogenesis would be in there and it isn't.