Spurred by an article I recently read about aging and death, and the causes, I've been thinking over the last couple of days about what exactly the compounds from the fruit from the tree of life did to stretch out human life indefinitely in the Garden of Eden. An interesting fact about the Tree of Life, is that, like immortality, the Flood and dragons, its iconography is found in some form in virtually every ancient culture and mythology surrounding the Black Sea for a thousand miles or more, and frequently flanked by two unknown figures in those cultures. In many cultures, the Tree of Life or its functional equivalent is guarded by a dragon, like the tree of the Hesperides in Greek Mythology. This does bear some resemblance to Eden, and thus the Tree of Life, being guarded by a Kheruv after humanity's expulsion.
The only fruit God told Adam not to eat from was the "Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil." From this I think it can be assumed that he and Eve, or what family group there was at the time, were already consuming the fruit from this tree. It has been my hypothesis that this is the reason for "Adam's" increased lifespan of 930 years as well as every one of his recorded descendants through Abraham that demonstrated longer than usual lifespans, though decreasing with each generation. Once this fruit had been removed from their diet (by removing them from its location), while the effects lingered from generation to generation, they did eventually succumb to natural death.
In the article I was reading, in an interview with him, Molecular Biologist Venki Ramakrishnan says, "Aging is an accumulation of chemical damage to the molecules inside our cells, which damages the cells themselves, and therefore the tissue, and then eventually us as an organism. Surprisingly, we start aging when we’re in the womb, although at that point, we’re growing faster than we’re accumulating damage. Aging happens throughout our lives, right from the very beginning. The body has evolved lots of mechanisms to correct age-related damage to our DNA and to any poor-quality proteins we produce. Without ways to correct these sorts of problems, we would never live as long as we do. Still, over time, damage begins to outpace our ability to repair. Think of the body as like a city containing lots of systems that must work together. Once an organ system critical to our survival fails, we die. For example, if our muscles become so frail that our heart stops beating, it can’t pump the blood containing the oxygen and nutrients our organs need and we die. When we say someone dies, we mean the death of them as an individual. In fact, when we die, most of ourselves, such as our organs, are alive. This is why the organs of accident victims can be donated to transplant." (DuLong, Jessica. "Why do we die? The latest on aging and immortality from a Nobel Prize-winning scientist." CNN.com, Tue April 9, 2024.)
In an online Chemistry textbook from Western Oregon Universtiy, it says, "In multicellular organisms, the response to DNA damage can result in two major physiological consequences: (1) Cells can undergo cell cycle arrest, repair the damage and re-enter the cell cycle, or (2) cells can be targeted for cell death (apoptosis) and removed from the population." (Flatt, P.M. (2019) Biochemistry – Defining Life at the Molecular Level. Published by Western Oregon University, Monmouth, OR (CC BY-NC-SA). Chapter 12.3.)
Speculating a little bit, it stands to reason that the fruit of the tree of life held a natural compound that supported and induced these repair responses in such a way so that the natural cellular repair systems were able to keep up with DNA damage at the molecular level and not be outpaced by it once the person who ate it had reached physical maturity. Thinking about it, I do wonder if it supported the second response of apoptosis more than the first. I say this because I have seen some pretty dramatic physical healing in brain tissue when apoptosis is induced, both through fasting, and through a couple of different machine methods using both light and sound. One of Tressa's doctors, and the one who helped her the most, had a machine which used sound waves to induce apoptosis with her damaged neurons. There was apparently no risk of the healthy neurons being damaged through this process. But the results could be dramatic, and are largely responsible for all of the progress she has made in the last four or five years. Heidi's forty day fasting stints where she induced hard ketosis also did something similar in that it induced the body to remove damaged cells. This was also a large part of why the plaques on her brain causing her MS dwindled to nothing from one MRI to the other.
My thought here is that, what if the fruit of the tree of life induced the mechanisms within the body to remove the cells with damaged DNA far more aggressively than normal, effectively scrubbing them on a regular basis after being consumed. With no damaged cells, the mature adult would not age, and thus would not die from old age. They would be effectively immortal as long as they continued to eat from this tree on a regular basis, barring physically fatal accidents. Also speculating, I would suspect that aggressive apoptosis or ketosis induction was not the only effect this fruit would have, but it would possibly be the major one in terms of anti-aging, and thus anti-dying properties.
My other thought on the subject is and has been that the reason why the fruit from the other tree had such an effect on the human brain was because those who ate it at the time were also eating the fruit from the tree of life. There was something about the toxin in the other fruit that, when combined with the compound from the fruit of the tree of life, altered our limbic system and the amygdala and hypothalamus specifically, causing them to malfunction from their original state. I tend to think it was a cyanogenic compound, and the other fruit a stone fruit of some kind. As far as is mentioned in Scripture, it was only Adam and/or his family group that were eating from the tree of life, and it was only the other tree which they were warned off of, possibly placed there as a food source for another animal for whom it was not toxic and would not have deleterious effects because the other animal wouldn't be consuming the fruit from the tree of life, placed there as a food source for Adam and his kin as it was.
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