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[Ciarente]

Possibly, whatever is toxic in hak'len tea and liquor is found in much, much lower concentrations in other plant-and/or-animal-life on Caldari Prime and consuming these lower, non-toxic concentrations builds up an immunity that makes the concentrated version non-lethal.

Arsenic is an example of a real-life, earth substance than can work in this way (in fact arsenic was a component in many beauty products), a fact that has been exploited by numerous mystery writers ("He can't have been poisoned by the tea! They both drank it! Unless the unusually thick and glossy hair and clear complexion of the suspect means  ... ")

[Adreena Madeveda]

Well... many populations around the world can't digest milk properly after childhood. As far as I know, is has nothing to do with genes : just bacterias.

Oh, and there's mithridatisation, too : acquired tolerance to poisons. Nothing to do with genes, either.

Whatever culture one's from, there will be delicacies from other cultures that'll make him sick as hell, bowels on fire, etc. Europeans are not snowflaky because they can digest cheese that would make an asian sick. Africans aren't snowflaky because some of their food is spicey enough to make europeans' guts melt.

As for the "why would people poison themselves ?" : tobacco. Alcohol. Yage. Etc. Poisonous things various cultures poisons themselves with.

[Saede Riordan]

I always took the minmatar voluval as a lelft over genemodding project (Jovians!) so it makes decent sense to me that the Caldari would also be modified slightly.

As for the resistance the caldari have to Kresh, that's actually fairly easy to swallow. For a real world example, just look at Gluten. To most of western society gluten is perfectly safe to eat and won't harm you unless your diet consists of nothing but it. However, in many tribal cultures, including ones from South America, Africa, and southeast Asia, do not have the ability to digest gluten at all, and will get horribly sick, bloaty feeling, and get no sustenance out of it. If fairly minor degree of population isolation can result in a trait like this becoming fixed in a population via genetic drift. Kresh isn't a big deal. My character has drank kresh before, she just had to take an enzyme pill with it to make sure she could digest it properly. Its entirely flavour RP and I don't see any reason why it shouldn't exist. I'm always a fan of worldbuilding and letting players make up things as opposed to sticking to canon. That said, I'd like to see more people who DO create stuff to link it up on evelopedia in an effort to expand what other people have to work with and make it easier to reference things.

[Matariki Rain]

Two different approaches: genemodding or acquired resistance. I prefer genemodding, since to my mind it fits the described data points better. Tinker with the Caldari settler genomes just enough that they produce a certain amino acid that means they can digest organic but normally-toxic local plantlife. That would then most likely be heritable and for most of their cultural existence quite possibly distinctively Caldari.

[Saede Riordan]

that of course assumes that the planet wasn't entirely barren or snowballed and actually had local plant life. For all we know, Kresh could have been imported from somewhere else in the milky way for some reason, perhaps its not even intended to be used as food. It could even be something that exists on earth today, we just don't eat it because toxic.

[lallara zhuul]

The cool thing about humans is that we are so adaptable.

We can thrive in the arctic and we can thrive in the desert.
 
I would think that the people that colonized Caldari Prime had access to the technological advancements of wearing clothes and building houses, thus eliminating any need for genemodding for environmental reasons.

The golden rule about world building of the colonies pre-collapse is the fact that the colonies had no idea that the collapse would occur.

Therefore things like losing logistics for food, medicine, tech and other resources came as a surprise for the colonists.

Not as something that they planned for.

If you want to start thinking about the genetic drift between the different bloodlines and whatnot in EVE, it is pretty simple.

Since the collapse the population collapsed as well.

When the technological advances that would keep the population alive are taken out of the picture then Evolution raises its magnificent ugly head.

Killing off everybody that cannot survive in the harsh conditions after the collapse.

No need for genemodding.

Just pure Evolution.

Humans are among the few mammals that can generate blubber to fend off the cold, just like seals, polar bears and whales.
The magical mystical superpower of the Caldari people would be...
The slight tendency to be able to create blubber more easily than other human stock.

There are a few problems that come into play when thinking about the survival of the Caldari after the collapse.

The colonists probably had rudimentary means of creating food within the colonies, hydroponics an such, but even that technology would deteriorate quite fast. The problem of course is the plant life, plants do grow during the winter, but they grow a lot slower than they do during the summer. Depending on any kind of farming pretty much useless, even genetically modified plant stock cannot escape the laws of physics. There just isn't enough energy to go around during a cold period to grow.

If we use Earth as an example, then on Caldari Prime there was a short summer and during that time pretty much everything started growing at insane speeds.
Get the pollen out, get the seeds grown and get the seeds into the ground.
Why seeds?
Because the seeds are protected against the cold.
Also during this time all the animal life kicked the summer off with an orgy followed by a feeding frenzy to get as much fat as possible to survive the cold and harsh winter.
The humans during this time did pretty much the same, but on top of that they gathered shitload of food for the winter.
Then spent the winter killing everything with fat on it and eating it.

Which pretty much explains why there is nothing but birds left on Caldari Prime.

Everything else was eaten by the Caldari.

Slowly the summers got longer, there was more plant stock in the larders, there was less need for hunting which was good because the prey got more scarce.

Those that could not stomach the vegetarian diet died off.

Kresh?

A spicy tea that makes you feel warm.

Perhaps with a little bit of hallucinogen or any compound that has trippy effect on people.

Hak'len?

When Caldari got into the farming stages of development they started putting Kresh into beer to make it more trippy.

When they hit industrial age they started sticking it into booze.

'Surviving' Hak'len might be just not getting freaked out by a bad trip you get from that shit.

Sci-fi explanations are cool and all that, but Evolution is much cooler.

[Mithfindel]

So, two options: Either there is some sort of ritualistic "coming of age" thing, which means that the entire population or nearly the entire population has acquired tolerance to the toxic compounds in kresh. Or then there has been a chance mutation in the population, resulting in a subpopulation that is naturally tolerant of the compound. Since the population levels assumably collapsed during the fall, it may be simple chance that the tolerant population was left.

And notably, the Caldari are not immune to the poison, only tolerant. Now, if including player fiction, Caldari can drink hak'len and live where Gallente will have death due to suffocation. An alcoholic drink is notable, since alcohol is also having a mild depressive effect (to the point that mixing alcohol and morphine may be fatal due to depressing the central nervous system).

Then, there is the kress tea, which reminds me of pufferfish/fugu: A kind of a delicacy (well, Caldari use it ritualistically) which, when correctly prepared, is safe. When incorrectly prepared, it is fatal. I would therefore assume that the Tea Makers know how to make kresh tea without extracting the toxin or, alternatively, in such a way that the toxin is extracted. It may be even as simple as a combination of solvent (water) temperature, duration of brewing the infusion, or a combination. Of course, a catalyst may be involved, as well, or the toxic compound may even break up at high enough temperatures. This would allow the tea maker to prepare seemingly similar cups of tea, possibly even from the same pot (if the ritual involves intermediate heating or cooling of the tea), some of the cups which are safe to drink and others fatal. If the water is changed, then there's one more parameter, as the tea maker can select the initial temperature of the water used, further obfuscating the water temperature from the participants. (Otherwise a knowledgeable drinker might be able to deduce water temperature from the duration and intensity of the heating, specially with a less experienced tea maker.)

Of course, at times the fate of the drinker may still be up to chance, depending on the exact concentration of the poison in the tea and the tolerance of the individual. If we assume that the Tea Maker ceremony was developed in the Raata period, then a tolerance to the poison would be a very desirable property with possibly considerable evolutionary pressure to develop. Culturally, it might be seen as the spirits favouring a specific noble who had been able to drink the tea several times (in a ceremony, not the "safe" tea served in funerals and similar rituals) without dying. Of course, assuming the Tea Maker is not impartial, this could be manipulated to make someone seem to be able to drink the Tea without dying, while it was actually safe - which could then make them more eager to use the method for solving disputes, making the person - or in case of inheritable property, his children - easier to get rid of. If noble houses select marriages based on the property, this could be one way of sabotaging their genome, depending on how the genotype manifests. Make a deal with a minor noble family with weak tolerance to suddenly appear to have caught the beneficial mutation, have one of them married off to a competitor (and thus elevating them in status) and then make a blow against your intended target generation later.

[Desiderya]

Regardless of the origins:
Workaround:
a) Take an antidot, risk being frowned at by other Caldari.
or
b) Order another caldari tea and accept it.

Additional PF bits on tea:

Traditional Caldari tea is prepared from the leaves of the kresh trees that can be found in the Kaalakiota Peaks on Caldari Prime, the home of the precursors of the modern Caldari known as the Raata. It has a strong and very bitter taste, and is an integral part of traditional Caldari culture. Practices like the Tea Maker Ceremony, for example, are carried out by citizens and corporate heads alike, used as a form of divine judgement with potentially lethal consequences. Kresh tea is thus regarded as divine amongst the Caldari, with other styles of tea from abroad being given alternative names within State borders.

As the Caldari have not had easy access to the Kaalakiotas in recent times, they instead cultivate the kresh leaves on New Caldari Prime and in specially-designed greenhouse modules in space. These leaves are regarded as not any less divine than the ones found on the original homeworld, justified by the significance that the exodus had on Caldari culture. That said, tea made from original kresh leaves from Caldari Prime is treasured highly, and is not to be drunk lightly. Imitations of kresh tea exist outside of the State, often sitting alongside other commercialized recipes.

Regarding origins:
A tolerance could be aquired simply by the fact that either Kresh leaves - or other parts from the tree, like the bark or sap - have been used as spices or directly as food from the beginning. Maybe the small dosage if used as a spice, or lower concentrations in parts of the plant lead to the aquired tolerance. Maybe it is the process of preparing the tea that makes it (more or less - Hamish's explanation is a possibility, too) toxic. Maybe it's not the tree itself that is toxic but a parasitic/symbiotic relationship with single cell organisms in the roots of the tree that produce a metabolite that's concentrated in the leaves. Certainly a lot food for thought.

[Svetlana Scarlet]

This really does not read like sound science. I'm no immunologist, but what is being proposed is that the default human physiology does not agree with kresh. For some reason, the Caldari can consume it. This would infer they consumed it repeatedly, poisoned themselves repeatedly, killed themselves repeatedly, to gain an immunity to it? Why would they do that? How did they gain the immunity in the first place?

It seems very special snowflake-y for me to RP, but if other Caldari agree with it, it puts my own interactions in a difficult position, because I with a Caldari character do not agree with the idea.

No, it infers that at some point during the initial colonization of Caldari Prime, the colonizing corporation came up with a gene therapy that changed the DNA of Caldari colonists to be able to digest life native to the planet they were colonizing. A "genemod" is not a natural process.

And Lallara, just because they can build shelters and wear clothes does not mean there's no need for genemodding. Being able to breath natively in a previously hostile atmosphere or integrate new organisms into an already-present biosphere has significant payoff in terms of reducing the costs of building shelter and feeding the population.

[Rhiannon]

4) The Caldari are extremely cliquey. Yes they are, it's more or less canon and it reminds a little of the japanese culture as well. We all know that some bits of Caldari remind the japanese extremely insular culture that even today sees strangers as mere "gaijin", like some bits of Amarr remind that culture as well on different points. Or like the Amarr borrow a lot of persian terminology, or the Minmatar a lot of Norse mythology, etc. That is, also, part of their flavor and I approve the cliquey bit.

This is the reason I like that the Napanii word for foreigner, jaijin sounds a lot like the Japanese word for the same.

[Louella Dougans]

there's another, more sinister, possibility regarding Kresh and such.

With Caldari Prime originally being a corporate purchased asset, there is the possibility that the original colonists had some kind of genetic tweaking to be dependent on a substance grown on the planet by the ancestors of the kresh trees.

Stops the colonist employees from doing a runner and setting up their own settlement.

And, over the ~15,000 years since, mutation has changed it all.

[lallara zhuul]

Like the lysine deficiency in Jurassic Park?

[Morwen Lagann]

Like the lysine deficiency in Jurassic Park?

There was more than just a lysine deficiency in play, in the novels anyway - they also used frog DNA to fill in the holes, and apparently frogs can change their sex if needed.

So their breeding of only female dinosaurs backfired there too. :welp: