origin of life != origin of species They are two different things.
A brief mention at the conclusion of Origin hardly counts as publishing on the subject. He admitted that at that time there were no tools available to investigate the origin of life.
Why not exactly? DNA provides the repository for the archetype and the secondary causes that result in the changes that get expressed. The very things Owen couldn’t explain.
In other words, evolution is more complex that what is presented in popular science articles, not that it is wrong and common descent is bad.
Which says nothing about common descent being wrong or requiring some kind of divine intervention to get to man.
I think you may be interpreting the proposal too narrowly as an attempt to replace evolution or deny biochemistry, when the argument is more about explanatory emphasis and the origin of higher-order constraints.
I agree that evolutionary theory already incorporates biochemistry, physical law, and developmental constraints to some extent. The question is whether those constraints are merely background conditions acting on otherwise largely stochastic evolutionary processes, or whether they play a more directive organizational role than standard accounts typically emphasize.
For example, the article explicitly acknowledges that Darwinian evolution explains adaptation through mutation, inheritance, and selection. The critique is not that evolution violates physics, but that classical evolutionary models generally do not provide predictive laws of biological form comparable to those Owen attempted to describe through structural constraints.
That is where quantum-biological and systems-level considerations become relevant. Processes such as proton tunneling, mutation bias, DNA-mediated charge transport, developmental canalization, and regulatory architecture suggest that biological variation may not explore morphospace as freely or isotropically as purely unconstrained stochastic models imply.
Importantly, the claim is not that quantum mechanics directly specifies future organisms or replaces natural selection. Rather, the proposal is that lower-level physical constraints may systematically bias which developmental and evolutionary trajectories become stable, repeatable, or biologically accessible.
You are correct that modern evolutionary theory can absorb many of these findings. But the question is whether these mechanisms are merely auxiliary details within evolution, or whether they point toward a deeper structural framework in which evolutionary outcomes are more strongly canalized by underlying organizational principles than standard Darwinian formulations traditionally emphasized.
How so though? Because the consensus said so. What’s the argument that proves they are two different things because Owen never viewed them as two different things. He assumed right from the outset that they were one of the same things before Darwin came along and tried to separate the two phenomena.
Explanatory power was not the issue. It was lack of evidence for these laws and mechanisms that would support his theory. Back then, there was no quantum physics or even laws of thermodynamics that would have supported his theory.
For the most part, Yes.
It does. Hugh Ross explained it in the article I gave you here: