Before Sin, there was no death. If Adam and Eve and the animals had genitals, it would only a matter of time before reproduction would cause Earth to became over populated had nobody sinned. Am I missing something here?
The tree of life is connected to natural instinct, which as evolution describes, is engrained into the DNA of each species, over a long period of time. The natural or genetic based operating system of the natural brain has instinct at birth. This type of knowledge comes from within each critter. You do not have to teach a cat to be a cat or a dog to be a dog.
The tree of knowledge is different in that this type of knowledge is taught from the outside, such as by teachers in school, via cultural traditions, via marketers, via fake news, etc. Unlike instinct that was naturally selected and engrained into the brain through eons of evolution, the outside knowledge is engrained through man made selection, will and choice. This type of knowledge is often temporal to each generation and often defines a generation. This is different from natural instinct that is slow to change and lingers in time. There are two different time scales.
Science can show that the invention of written language occurred about 5000-6000 years ago. This invention was critical to the formation of permanent civilization. The Bible says, "In the beginning was the word, and the word was God." God may have been the first written word, just as the Bible was the first published book using the printing press to get exact duplicates. My guess is the word for sound God, was broken down into the first few letters, and then other spoken words were scaled from these, to form all the base sounds and symbols needed for the alphabet.
Written language altered how the human brain worked. Before written language, you had spoken language which would be forgotten or embellished over time. But once written language was invented, ideas would be carved into stone with great detail, allowing memory to be refreshed, with an exact duplicate. This long term memory schema could then compete with natural instinct, that comes from inside; collective human propensities.
The type of written language that screwed things up was knowledge of good and evil or law. It is one thing to create law with just spoken language. Memory changes as we age, allowing the natural brain to change law with time, due to everyone not being able to agree on the original intent or need, as time goes on. But once law was carved into stone, with written language, it could linger way beyond its usefulness, due to being refreshed by each generation. This caused repression and other types of psychological problems.
The analogy would be like parents making rules for their young children to keep them safe. This sound like a good thing. But say these rule were not just spoken, but written down, never to change, even as the children become adults. Now you screw up the adult children, needing even more laws to mop up the mess the original set of written laws created in the future. Death appears due to the cascade affect of becoming repressed and unnatural. If you look at holy books from various religions, these are close to the written originals. They are often rewritten into modern languages, so the original intent can be learned; relearn the childhood of the new human mind.
Other practical uses of written language, not taboo or connected to knowledge of good and evil, that were useful and needed to sustain civilization, was record keeping for commerce, plans for building cities, scientific observations of nature and the heavens, food production techniques, etc.The subjectivity of good and evil was the downfall of the new invention. It would repress the natural humans and make humans become inhuman; war due to long standing records of grudges. These old written records are still in affect in the Middle East.
The tree of life; instinct, was taken away or repressed, but not destroyed, so humans did not engrain their repressive behavior into the natural human DNA. This would have made human beasts; cruel and perverted animals prone to war and other bestial atrocity.
