[Serious] Literal and Not Literal

[Mister Agenda]

Any person that has produced wine knows this. When you put the grapes with juice and depending if you want to make red or white put in the engaço (sorry if not the english word for it). After that, sift the juice that has lactobateria in in into wood barrels and voila, wine that depending on the temperature gives you more or less alcohol. Why? In anaerobic conditions, those bacteria produce poo to them as what we call alcohol, until they get into so much squalor (the alcohol) that they die off and fermentation ends...

I'm aware, but, its not the same thing. Fermentation and respiration are part of the organism's metabolism whereas bacteriocins are produced specifically to kill other bacteria. I haven't had the pleasure of producing wine, but I did take an elective course on microbiology.

Reference: Madigan, M. T., Martinko, J. M., Bender, K. S., Buckley, D. H., & Stahl, D. A. (2015). Biology of Microorganisms. Boston: Pearson.

There are many, many species of bacteria. Unless you're talking about a strain of bacteria that emits toxins that act specifically against its own species, there's no biological mystery to solve here. Emitting toxins to kill other strains of bacteria is just eliminating the competition and would obviously be selected for if it was more dangerous to other species of bacteria than it's own. .

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Our of curiosity, how do people in here determine which evolutionary explanation of how features like sacrificing our lives for others developed, is the correct one? We clearly can't repeat the process, and have no video tape of how it all took place?

So what determines whether one explanation is more likely to be true than another? Is it just a matter of cherry picking the one we like the best?

Do you think that if, among several explanations, you pick the one that best fits the available data as most likely to be closest to what's actually true, that it is an example of what most people mean by 'cherry-picking'?