Scallops aren’t animals? Is the author not a journalist?

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!

When leadership matters

There are legitimate fears of a coronavirus pandemic — don’t panic, it’s an emerging threat, not a full blown emergency — and that’s when it’s a good idea to prepare. We should have a strong medical infrastructure, plans in place, people organizing now, just in case. In the US, however, our plan to respond to potential medical threats is a shambles.

For the United States, the answers are especially worrying because the government has intentionally rendered itself incapable. In 2018, the Trump administration fired the government’s entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure. In numerous phone calls and emails with key agencies across the U.S. government, the only consistent response I encountered was distressed confusion. If the United States still has a clear chain of command for pandemic response, the White House urgently needs to clarify what it is—not just for the public but for the government itself, which largely finds itself in the dark.

Who is to blame for the chaos? It seems Obama had a thorough, if flawed, response team in place. One man and one party have been actively working to dismantle the entire system.

In the spring of 2018, the White House pushed Congress to cut funding for Obama-era disease security programs, proposing to eliminate $252 million in previously committed resources for rebuilding health systems in Ebola-ravaged Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. Under fire from both sides of the aisle, President Donald Trump dropped the proposal to eliminate Ebola funds a month later. But other White House efforts included reducing $15 billion in national health spending and cutting the global disease-fighting operational budgets of the CDC, NSC, DHS, and HHS. And the government’s $30 million Complex Crises Fund was eliminated.

In May 2018, Trump ordered the NSC’s entire global health security unit shut down, calling for reassignment of Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer and dissolution of his team inside the agency. The month before, then-White House National Security Advisor John Bolton pressured Ziemer’s DHS counterpart, Tom Bossert, to resign along with his team. Neither the NSC nor DHS epidemic teams have been replaced. The global health section of the CDC was so drastically cut in 2018 that much of its staff was laid off and the number of countries it was working in was reduced from 49 to merely 10. Meanwhile, throughout 2018, the U.S. Agency for International Development and its director, Mark Green, came repeatedly under fire from both the White House and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. And though Congress has so far managed to block Trump administration plans to cut the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps by 40 percent, the disease-fighting cadres have steadily eroded as retiring officers go unreplaced.

But here’s what worries me most: the systemic incentive to continue to wreck what system we have. There is no price the Republicans will have to pay. People will die, the country could be thoroughly disrupted, and the demagogues will just blame it all on the Democrats, or the Chinese, or Islamic terrorists, or filthy disease-ridden immigrants, and people will want to believe them, and everything will just get worse. In fact, catastrophe will strengthen their grip on the country.

Heckuva job, Trumpy.

Cool but impractical driving hack

Google Maps provides real-time traffic information along your route by by counting the number of cell phones in use along that stretch of road, which suggests that you could fool Google by loading up a large number of phones and bringing them with you. This guy is claiming to have demonstrated that by filling a little red wagon with 99 cell phones, impersonating a traffic jam, and trundling along roads that are relatively empty of cars.

I don’t know if I believe it, and the video doesn’t show it. I mean, he does show screens from Google Maps that light up red as he walks along, so I can believe that he’s exposing the algorithm, but I doubt that it would have a particularly strong effect on traffic — those streets are empty because of the time of day that he chose to record it. How many people diligently plan their commute by checking for traffic flow, and have a set of alternative routes? How many would use the evidence of their eyes, that that street over there is obviously clear of cars, to decide where to go?

I don’t count because out here, a traffic jam is when more than two cars are waiting at a stop sign.

If it does work, I’d expect rich people to load up on cell phones in their cars just to discourage others from following their route. I could imagine Elon Musk thinking this was a clever idea. It’s more practical than boring tunnels everywhere you want to go, anyway.

If you’re on Facebook to follow Stephen King, don’t bother

Stephen King has announced that he has left Facebook! The trickle has swollen to a raging…well, trickle. I doubt that Facebook is panicking over the departure of a few people. But his reasons are good!

I’m quitting Facebook. Not comfortable with the flood of false information that’s allowed in its political advertising, nor am I confident in its ability to protect its users’ privacy.

If it’s any help to others, I can tell you that this is the easiest addiction to break, ever. I just stopped cold turkey and didn’t miss it at all. I think it’s the act of being on Facebook that provides the stimulus to keep following the stream, and once you get away from it, all interest fades fast.

It’s an anniversary!

Ten years ago today, the Lancet issued a formal retraction of Andrew Wakefield’s notorious bogus paper claiming a link between MMR vaccinations and autism. The paper was wrong, it was shoddily done, and the work hasn’t been replicated.

Ever since, Wakefield has been living in shame, no one treats him as an authority anymore, and of course no one would claim that vaccines cause autism anymore.

Am I the only one who thought The Good Place finale was BS?

The Good Place was a comedy show about the afterlife that took philosophical questions seriously — in fact, much of the action involved placing interesting characters in difficult situations that required them to think through their choices. It featured characters with broadly exaggerated, but mostly endearing, flaws who had to cope with a complex afterlife that kept confronting them with meaning and purpose and conflict, which they generally overcame with good humor. It was a kind of Sesame Street for beginning philosophers.

They recently aired their grand finale, ending the season and the series definitively. It was an entertaining, sweet, charming episode in which characters we’d grown to know and love moved on (or beyond) their afterlife. I enjoyed watching it, and it was quite nice to see a show wrap up four years of build-up in a consistent, satisfying way (Game of Thrones, I’m giving you some side-eye there).

But here’s my problem with it: shouldn’t a show that is wallowing happily in its philosophy at some point question its premises? The show concludes nicely within the self-contained bubble of its own conceits, but it never tries to go outside of them — instead, it builds a complex set of rules that sort of work together and provide a framework for coming up with answers that fit its universe, but never steps outside of itself.

The premises of The Good Place are

that people have an essence that persists after death,
that there are higher powers that judge your behavior,
and that the universe is ultimately kind.

Accept those ideas, and you have a set of rules within which characters can operate and drive a story. These are also premises that are as old as sentient beings’ attempts to find meaning in their existence, and they are also the premises that people want to be true, which ought to immediately throw up a red flag on the play. I distrust those ideas. I can see how they are necessary to drive a commercially viable, relatively long-running narrative, but there are alternatives that aren’t addressed.

It’s a kind of anti-Lovecraftian show, for example. The premises of a Cthulhu story would be

that people are insignificant, ephemeral specks moving into the void,
that there are greater beings who are implacable and unsympathetic,
and that the universe is ultimately cruel in its uncaring nature.

There isn’t a lot of room for humor or plot development there. My show, The Meaningless Place, which I ought to float for some network executives, would begin with Eleanor Shellstrop dying an unexpected, arbitrary death, and then…credits. We could maybe linger over her decaying corpse for a bit, but otherwise it’s over. There are no amusing hijinks, no character development, no dilemmas for Eleanor to think about, because she has ceased to exist and there is no one there to think anymore. The universe would roll on, unperturbed. Viewers would receive no comfort or consolation in a heart-warming finale.

It would be cheap and quick to make, at least.

I can understand why the show made the decisions it did — it was one of the few ways to set up propositions that would allow dead people to move within a framework interesting to living people — but its premises are also its greatest limitations. I can still enjoy The Good Place as a thought experiment or metaphor for a humanist ideal of a well considered life, but the finale only works within its own conceits, and none of its solutions are applicable to me. I’d been maneuvered into an improbable scenario with its own internal logic that had placed it outside of any useful experience.

Which is fine. You can still enjoy a fantasy novel, even if dragons and magic aren’t real. It’s just hard to find a real-life situation where dragon-slaying skills matter.

Need assistance with a social interaction

About once a week, I go into a bait shop (bait shops are far cheaper than pet stores) to buy a bunch of wiggly invertebrates for certain purposes. As I’m leaving with my purchase, the clerk invariably wishes me good luck on my fishing ventures; I’m becoming a familiar enough customer that I expect him to start chatting about what lake I’m ice-fishing at, or about how successful last week’s fishing trip was. This worries me.

So, when the guy says “Good fishing!” as I leave, how should I reply?

  1. “Uh, errm, thanks! Bye!”
  2. “Yes. I’m sure the fishes will find your high-quality invertebrates delectable.”
  3. “EEP! I’m caught!” [runs for the exit]
  4. “Fish? Bwahahaha. No. These are provisions for my spider horde.”
  5. [Stare silently. Remove one worm, pop it into my mouth. Chew contemplatively, as if trying to think how to answer]

I usually answer the first way, I’m sorry to say. How should I reply, and how would you? Better suggestions welcome.

Why do scientists cheat?

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.