Oh, man. This is bad. An article on Vice asks, Are Scallops Vegan?, and if you know the rule of questions in headlines, the answer should be “NO”, but this article actually plumps down on the side of “maybe?”

In the case of bivalves—that is, sea creatures with a hinged shell, such as oysters, clams, mussels, and scallops—the line between plant and animal, especially in regards to cooking and eating, remains unclear. “But, they’re alive,” someone may say who has seen the pulse of oyster flesh or the slow opening and closing of a scallop shell. But so are plants—every carrot you slice and every apple you bite into was once alive, and begins to die as it’s removed from its stem or roots. And while some bivalves, like scallops, open and close their shells by using an adductor muscle, plenty of plants can also independently move.

Being alive is not an adequate criterion — it doesn’t distinguish anything in biology. By definition, “life” is “alive”. But whether molluscs of any kind are animals or not is unambiguous — yes, they are animals. They are triploblastic, bilaterian protostomes, members of the lophotrochozoan clade in this diagram.

It’s always a good idea, O Journalist, that when you have a biology question you should ask a biologist, and not just a random layperson you meet at Whole Foods. Or at a local seafood restaurant.

I, a lapsed vegetarian, first heard the argument that scallops could be considered vegan during a recent lunch at Greenpoint Fish & Lobster Co., a Brooklyn seafood restaurant dedicated to sustainability. Though a spot with fish tacos and daily oyster selections may not seem like a vegan’s first pick for dinner, co-owner Vinny Milburn told me that the restaurant has numerous vegan regulars who visit to eat scallops and other bivalves, justifying their consumption, ethically and environmentally, with science. “They feel okay about it because it doesn’t have a central nervous system,” Peter Juusola, general manager at Greenpoint Fish told me.

Uh, they’re not vegans. They’re not even vegetarians. They’re pescatarians. Which is perfectly OK, I’m more of a pescatarian myself, because while I’ve been cutting back, I do eat seafood now and then. I’m not judging them, except to point out that mislabeling yourself because you’re pretending to be more ethical and environmentally sensitive than you actually are is dishonest and a bit yucky.

See that diagram above, with the colored bits labeled protostomes and deuterostomes? All of the members of those groups have nervous systems, every one. So do the ctenophores and cnidarians, although they tend to be more diffuse and lacking in specialized regions. Sponges do not have a nervous system, although their cells do communicate with one another using protein networks that have evolved into our nervous system. Arguing that vegans get to eat anything lacking a nervous system, a dubious claim, would mean you only get to eat sponges. If having localized collections of neurons that function as a kind of primitive “brain” qualifies as an exclusion, you also get to eat jellyfish.

Molluscs do have a central nervous system in the form of a couple of ganglia. Those count.

The killer counterargument, as far as I’m concerned, is that scallops have eyes. You’re not a vegan if you eat something that can look back at you. They’re even pretty blue eyes!

This does not seem to persuade some people, who ignore the physical evidence.

Conclusive evidence on whether bivalves, or even crustaceans, for that matter, feel pain, has yet to surface, but for starters, they “do not have a brain,” Juusola says, demonstrating with his fingers that when a scallop opens and closes, that’s a reaction due to a nervous system, not their nervous system calling out pain or danger.

They have multiple ganglia, which can be demonstrated anatomically, but apparently the argument from “opening and closing fingers” refutes the observable existence of coordinated, interacting sets of neurons.

I’m going to have to remember that one. When someone questions me on whether Trump has a brain, I’ll just wiggle my fingers and say, “Obviously, no. See my fingers?” In other good news, we can also legitimize the claim that the rich are brainless non-animals, allowing vegans to eat them.

So what are you waiting for, vegans of the world? Dig in!

I am dismayed at this emerging story about fraud in science. It stars Jonathan Pruitt, a professor at McMaster University who studies variation in individual behavior and how it affects group behavior. I’d heard of him since he’s doing a lot of work in social spiders.

He built up several productive collaborations, in particular with Kate Laskowski at UC Davis, sharing data with her that she used in several publications. That’s where the story turns dark, because Laskowski later examined the data in more detail and found multiple examples of blocks of data having been duplicated, padding the data set with more replicates than were actually done. He’d actually passed her a poison pill that tainted all the work they’ve done together; her papers are no longer trustworthy, and she has retracted them.

Laskowski is being heroically restrained in her reaction to this betrayal — I’d probably be throwing things and saying lots of not-nice words. Pruitt also seems to be peculiarly blasé and detached from the problem, conceding that there are serious problems in the data set, but not offering any explanations about how this has happened (again, if some of my data were found to be bogus, I’d either be furious and trying to track down the source of the bad data, or, if I were guilty of doing the duplications, I guess I’d be trying hard to deflect.)

There’s a lot of discussion and dissection of this issue going on, and most of it seems to be rightly concerned with making sure Pruitt’s coauthors aren’t hit with serious splash damage. At some point, though, there has to be a reckoning, and the source of the contamination tainting so much work will have to be dealt with. So far, everyone seems to be strangely cautious and circumspect.

I will not say Jonathan Pruitt is a victim, but he is part of the tragedy. Will we ever really know what motivated him? I decline to guess. He burst on the animal behavior scene with his first paper in 2008 and immediately began publishing at such a prolific rate that in another year or two he would have overtaken my own 41 year career in numbers of publications. This output got him a lot of academic success leading to his current position (current as I write anyway) of Canada 150 chair at McMaster University.

What Jonathan Pruitt produced was so far beyond average, it is hard to believe anyone would feel pushed to that level. But others feel pressure to produce in academia.

Fine. I’m not involved in any of this concern, so it’s not my place to say how the victims ought to respond. But I would say that the slower the build-up, the bigger the explosion, and so far this is looking to be a truly ugly meltdown at some point in the near future. Keep an eye on Jonathan Pruitt, there will be a supernova at some point soon, and not the good, pretty kind.

I’m mainly dismayed at the failure of scientific ethics. You don’t make up data! Ever! Every year I’m in student labs, explaining to students that “your data is your data” (I literally say that a lot, I’m afraid), and if your experiment didn’t come out the way you expected, or the data are ambiguous about what the one true Answer is, your job isn’t to make the data fit, it’s to rethink your work, track down sources of confusion, repeat the work, analyze the results appropriately, and if it doesn’t support your expected answer, revise your expectations.

That’s easy for me, though. The students don’t have a publication in Nature or a tenure decision in their favor, so they’re lacking all that unscientific pressure to get the neat, tidy, snazzy answer with beautiful p values.