PAINTED STARS → CHARLES XAVIER

painted stars

MY LONGINGS STAY
UNSPOKEN AND I MAY
NEVER OPEN UP THE
WAY I DID FOR YOU.

AND THIS IS WHEN THE FEELING SINKS IN,

There are two major (and rather conflicting) theories as to how human beings came to be. The first theory is one that many people are told inside of the walls of the church, that human beings were created by God and in his likeness. That God created Adam from dust and Eve from Adam's rib on the sixth day, eventually leading to the creation of human beings. This theory is one that many find comfort in. That many find themselves relying on when times get tough. A reminder than no matter what goes wrong in their life God had created them to be of his likeness. And no matter what, things would go back to normal. But this theory had no way of being proven. Especially now. Thousands of years had passed by, the Bible had been translated from hundreds of languages since then. And faith could only take people so far. Because at some point, even the most devoted of believers will come to a fateful moment in time where they have to question what they believe in. Which leads them to the second theory — human beings evolved over time. A scientific process that has been seen over and over again with thousands of species. Speciation. Evolution. It's all one and the same, backed up with hundreds to hundreds of thousands of years worth fossil evidence. The not-so-simple yet currently being oversimplified theory that human beings, the species Homo sapiens, evolved from primates into Neanderthals, later becoming the human beings seen walking on this earth today. Science has facts, at least things that scientists believe to be a fact, but little comfort. Nothing that can give someone the peace, nothing that provided them faith in the unknown. Because, to the people who knew science, the unknown was just that. It would never be known, because science would never be able to have an answer for everything.

Including whether or not human beings have continued to evolve since the species had evolved.

Of course, there were a select few scientists who knew. Genetics was key to that, every minute of every hour of every day a human beings DNA was being replicated. Cells rapidly dividing having to go through the cell cycle — firstly by altering their heterochromatin and turning it into euchromatin, being read over and quickly being replicated during the G phase, the chromosomes being paired together as sister chromatids. And suddenly the cell finds itself in the M phase, mitotic phase, going through five stages (interphase, prometaphase, metaphase, anaphase, and telophase) before finally undergoing cytokinesis and creating two identical daughter cells. Identical was a funny way to put it. Because any good scientist knows that the amount of human DNA held within a cell can span up to three meters in length if it were held together like a rope. And as magical as the human body seemed to be, it wasn't perfect. It couldn't be perfect. At some point mistakes would be made, errors leading to mutations throughout the process. Mutations that somehow skip through the checkpoints of the cell cycle, saving the cell from being marked for apoptosis. Allowing the cell to do what it was meant to do: proliferate. And these mutations are exactly what cause variations in human beings. The reasons behind why people have different hair colors, different eye colors. The reason behind why some people are more likely to have a certain disease than others.