Ethanol is highly volatile—it readily evaporates. Yeasts weren’t trying to sterilize their surroundings. All they want to do is get their garbage out of the house, and packaging it as ethanol was the most efficient approach. Then the angiosperms came around. “Now they’re living in fleshy fruit,” says Benner. “But they’re already resistant to ethanol. So the yeast is now all of a sudden pre-evolved. You’re looking at what appears, in retrospect, to be the yeast getting ready for fruits. But that’s not right.”
