The fruit of the cherry is easily spoiled: rough handling, bird pecks, insect bites, mold - all can render the cherry unappealing or inedible.
The cherry picker is trained to pick only the best cherries: the ones that will appeal most to consumers.
Fruit pickers, tree surgeons and others often use a hydraulic lift to reach into high work areas. These lifts can let the operator reach exactly the right spot - exactly the right cherry, in a manner of speaking.
By extension, the machine is called a cherry-picker.
By analogy, anyone who selects only the data that appeals to them and supports their personal view or theory is called a cherry picker.
The world we live in just can't be understood by picking the best cherries. It is best to approach the greatest of trees - the tree of knowledge - with a view to examining all of its parts and workings. Stand back and take a cross-disciplinary look. The view from back here is awesome!
When once you have had your breath taken away by that magnificent view, you will make up your own mind about which is the good fruit, and which the bad. You will learn your own way to pick from amongst the easy and the hard fruits of knowledge.
...Image and extract from poem sourced from: flickr.com ajawin lepiaf.geo
I picked the easy and the hard ones
The ones that were offered to everybody
And ones hidden till my eyes
willed their shelter away.
...
The bigger picture
By all means let others lead you to the tree of knowledge. But never, ever accept a ride in their cherry-picker. Choose you own view of the tree, your own path along its many branches.
Beware the cherry picker. The cherry-picker will dangle a sweet and juicy cherry before your eyes so as to block your view of the bigger picture.
Image source: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_102.html
Credit:
Tree pictures modified by Patrick Lockerby from Wikipedia:
Image by Larry D. Moore, used under a Creative Commons ShareAlike License.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Big_tree.jpg
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