The first real intelligent design experiment

I certainly cannot figure out any sort of relation between the thread/post title and the content. For that matter, it's quite difficult to derive any meaning from either the title or the content. In any case, I was intrigued by finding these two phrases in this original post: I wonder whether this is based on knowing what is normally done to olives between the time they are picked and the time they are eaten. If you have never had the opportunity to eat a fresh olive that has just been picked from the tree, you will be in for a surprise the first time you try it.The unprocessed olive is neither food nor fruit -- it is utterly inedible until it has been soaked for a few weeks in a solution of lye and water. It has always been, for me, one of the profound mysteries of human development: who could have possibly figured out how to make olives edible? Granting that someone, at some time, felt compelled to accomplish this feat, how could the notion of soaking in lye possible have been considered as a means to that end?Even if we consider only olive oil, it is equally difficult for me to imagine how this process would have come into existence -- I've been downwind of a factory that produces olive oil a few times, and I would be quite happy not to repeat the experience.Don't get me wrong -- I love olives and olive oil, once they have been properly processed for human consumption. My own dad used to prepare olives that he picked from the trees next to our house, and we ate them with delight, but his process for "curing" them was carefully studied and just as carefully carried out -- it had to be -- because both the original olives and key components of "curing" were fairly toxic.So, if that paraphrase from Genesis really does refer to the olive tree, perhaps it dates from a time before people knew how to cure olives, and God was just stating the obvious: humans could not eat that "fruit", because it really is inedible. And maybe a little more paraphrasing and interpretation will reveal that the original sin was actually the invention of the lye solution to cure olives and make them edible!! It seems obvious enough that disposing of the lye solution would have rather poisonous effects on the garden -- reason enough to evict the polluters, who certainly should have been ashamed for causing such damage.

---

autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.

Having just googled it, I find that there are numerous methods for curing olives (which I was unaware of), and many of them do not involve lye, but they all involve rather a lot of water and/or a lot of some other resource (often large quantities of salt), as well as weeks worth of patience and diligence. Either that, or (much more likely) people who really need to eat something simply try and try again, and learn from the mistakes that don't kill them. Bear in mind that quite a lot of this sort of thing (figuring out what's edible and how to make it palatable) went on long before (and far outside the region of) the Hebrew society that first conceived the God you speak of.

---

autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.