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Robert Owen, in the first two decades of the 19th century, developed a political project of economic, social, and political regeneration that he applied with considerable success in the microcosm of his factory/village in New Lanark. Despite of the criticisms directed at him by Marx and Engels, Owen’s thought contains several reflections and proposals that have not only proved pragmatic and effective in the decades that followed, but also contain a propulsive and unifying force that could facilitate the reconstitution of those ties, if not community ties, at least social and economic ones, which the outbreak of the Covid 19 pandemic shattered.

Firstly, in this article it is examined the nature of the putative remarks concerning evolution of species that are found in the works that Richard Owen published before 1858; and then it is made the same thing with the few and vague evolutionist conjectures that Owen certainly made after the public presentation of Natural Selection Theory. Regarding the former topic, the goal will be to highlight the ambiguity of those Owen’s remarks, and concerning the latter topic what is looked for is to show that, when he explained his transmutationist thesis, Owen didn’t go beyond a pious theistic evolutionism, without postulating any mechanism of evolutionary change and remaining faithful to Design Theology praised by Paley.

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