The powers, aspirations, and mission of man are such as to raise the study of his origin and nature, inevitably and by the very necessity of the case, from the mere physiological to the psychological stage of scientific operations.

Owen tried to smear Huxley by portraying him as an "advocate of man's origins from a transmuted ape" and one of his contributions to the Athenaeum was titled "Ape-Origin of Man as Tested by the Brain". In 1871 Owen was found to be involved in a threat to end government funding of Joseph Dalton Hooker's botanical collection at Kew possibly trying to bring it under his British Museum. as that he has never reared one pupil or follower.

Sir Richard Owen FRS KCB (20 July 1804 – 18 December 1892) was an English biologist comparative anatomist and paleontologist. Owen's approach to evolution can be seen as having anticipated the issues that have gained greater attention with the recent emergence of evolutionary developmental biology.