The family is an intimate stage upon which evolution's play unfolds, and
all Earth's creatures -- humans and birds, for
example -- are equally accomplished players.
A quarter-century ago stephen Emlen set out to investigate tales of an
African utopia. He had heard of villages in
Kenya where as many as 300 individuals lived in apparent harmony, despite
being packed together in clustered
homes. Even when food grew scarce, everyone shared what was available.
Males and females took turns caring for
children. Couples were monogamous, and to all appearances faithful. Grown
children, rather than leaving home and
starting families of their own, often stayed on to help their parents tend
to younger brothers and sisters. Sometimes
they helped neighbors. Altruism, in short, prevailed over self-interest.
The residents of this peaceable kingdom were not people--they were birds,
of a species called the white-fronted
bee-eater. But to Emlen, a Cornell biologist who studies animal behavior,
that trivial fact did nothing to lessen the
mystery of the phenomenon. Evolution should create struggle between bee-eaters
as individuals try to maximize their
own and their offspring’s chances of survival--not a purely selfless society.
When Emlen set out for Kenya, he
thought he was about to discover an exception to nature’s laws. But after
years of research, he realized that he had
instead found the “exception” that proves the rule: bee-eaters in fact
do not altruistically help strangers; rather,
through the complex dynamics of their large, multigenerational families,
they help themselves. The myriad ways in
which bee-eater parents, children, aunts, uncles, and grandparents behave
toward one another exquisitely match what
you’d predict from the principles of natural selection. Hidden under the
utopian veneer is a swirling soap opera of
love, deceit, harassment, divorce, and adultery.
Was Emlen disappointed with his hard-won findings? Not in the least. They
led him to thinking about families. Why,
he began to ask himself, do some species form families while others cut
their ties to their children as fast as possible?
Why do individuals behave differently in different kinds of family structures,
and is that behavior predictable? In
pursuit of answers to such questions, Emlen has embarked on a quest for
a full-blown, mathematically rigorous model
of the family.
“It’s time to lay this out as a unified theory,” he says--a theory of not
just bee-eater families, but all families, humans
included.
As Emlen walks into his office at Cornell he brushes past Clint Eastwood.
The cardboard cutout of the movie star
squints back in utter disgust, as if itching to gun him down. Ten feet
away, Indiana Jones lurks in a doorway. Students
set up the cutouts--they regard Emlen as something of a scientific swashbuckler,
but he tries to play down the
reputation. It is true that he has walked barefoot at night through Kenyan
grasslands (so as not to disturb sleeping
chicks), despite the deadly resident puff adders. And when in Panama, he
has worried a bit about the alligatorlike
caimans--especially when he gets excited, stands up in a canoe, spills
a laptop or a pair of binoculars, and then has to
dive into the water to wrench those valuables from the ooze. But no caiman
has ever really bothered him; they’re
interested only in birds and eggs.
In Emlen’s experience, the biggest threats to tropical biologists are akin
to the ones that might fell a weekend
gardener. In 1991, for example, Emlen hurt his back in Panama while pulling
30-foot-long poles from river-bottom
muck (the poles held up bird-catching nets). He ruptured two disks and
he’s had two operations; right now he can
barely sit. In the office he works mostly standing up. Soft rubber under
the carpet cushions his fidgety pacing; a
lectern allows him to read while standing, and he has raised his telephone,
computer, and microscope chest high. In the
field, Emlen says, he’s been able to modify a canoe seat so he can work
in quasi comfort.
In light of these hardships the man seems remarkably chipper. He greets
everyone with equal gusto--students,
colleagues, the handyman refitting his office. Walking around campus--which
he seems eager to do to help relieve the
stress in his back--he quickly becomes excited, at times exuberant, when
discussing his work. If he lost another
laptop, a few more birds to predators, or even another utopia or two, they
would simply be grist for his mill.
Emlen traces the origins of his current fascination with families to the
early 1970s, when evolutionary biologists were
hot on finding a scientific explanation for altruism. How does selfless
behavior--helping others at one’s own
expense--make sense? It seemed to contradict Darwinian thinking. In those
days the notion of the “selfish gene”
began to reign supreme. According to this idea, bodies are essentially
fancy machines that genes invented to help
themselves replicate. When an animal has genes that confer some advantage--when
a predator gains better eyesight, or
a prey animal better camouflage--that individual becomes more likely to
survive long enough to mate and multiply its
genes. It’s as if the genes themselves are forever seeking better strategies
to build as many bodies as possible, while
pouring copies of their tiny life codes into them all. The fittest genes--the
ones that produce the most copies of
themselves--dominate the population.
Behavior fits into this theory if genes can somehow control it. Animals
that can become more or less aggressive, for
example, or more or less cooperative, might be more likely to survive in
certain situations than others. Altruism,
however, presents a challenge. Self-sacrifice simply doesn’t seem to offer
any beneficial return, especially if it means
sacrificing an opportunity to breed. Genes that tell bodies not to breed
should not survive, and yet such behavior
clearly exists. “In birds, the most extreme cases of apparent altruism
are nicknamed helpers,” says Emlen.
“Individuals forgo breeding for large portions of their lives and instead
help someone else raise kids. The apparent
cost is high: you’re forfeiting your own reproduction; you’re increasing
the reproduction of somebody else. So it’s a
classic case of the paradox.”
A theorist named William Hamilton solved at least part of the puzzle. Starting
in 1964, he produced a sheaf of
mathematical work showing how your genes can benefit when you help other
people’s children survive-- if those kids
happen to be your kin. When you raise your own children, your genes are
nurturing copies of themselves. If your
genes can program you to feel tender emotions toward those kids, it works
to your genes’ selfish advantage. But
Hamilton realized that other relatives carry copies of at least some of
your genes, and he expanded the concept of
fitness to include the survival of more distant kin. It’s as if your genes
get a 50 percent payoff by helping perpetuate
your own kids’ genes (with whom you share 50 percent identical genes),
or 25 percent by helping your sister’s kids,
your grandchildren, and so forth. The more distant the relation, the lower
the payoff.
With arithmetic like this, it becomes clear that in plentiful times young
adults may get the best genetic payoff by
leaving home and starting their own families. But in times of scarce food
supplies, the odds of those kids surviving
might be low. The genetic payoff will then be higher if those young adults
cooperate with other adults to raise a close
relative’s offspring. By Hamilton’s logic, a spinster aunt who helps bring
up her nieces and nephews can sometimes
be genetically fitter than a recklessly prolific breeder.
It was an elegant model of family behavior--but the white-fronted bee-eater
seemed to fly in its face. “The reason I
went after bee-eaters,” Emlen says, “is they were seen to have complex,
nonfamily helping.” Humans give that kind
of help, but anthropologists often explain it in terms of reciprocity.
Perhaps, he thought, the bee-eaters were also
somehow returning help they got from outside their own families. Today
his evaluation of that speculation is simple.
“I was wrong,” he says with a laugh.
Science has always been a family business for Emlen. His father, renowned
biologist John Emlen, took him along
when he did fieldwork in Wyoming and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. When Stephen
first headed to Africa in 1973
to study bee-eaters, he took with him his wife, Natalie Demong; on later
trips they brought their children. (One son,
George, is now an evolutionary biologist also, carrying the family business
into a third generation.) It was a family of
humans observing families of birds. Usually a student or two would take
a semester off to accompany them, and
halfway through the project one of them, Peter Wrege, became a permanent
member of the team.
They spent eight years intensely studying bee-eaters, half the time in
Africa observing the birds and half back home in
Ithaca, poring over notes and data. Assessing the costs and benefits of
bee-eater behavior wasn’t easy: the birds live
together in groups of several hundred, and they all look pretty much alike,
whether male or female: green backs, tan
bellies, white and red throat stripes, gracefully curved black beaks. They
live in holes a yard or two deep dug into the
sides of dirt cliffs; the Emlens caught the birds in mist nets as they
emerged from their holes-- positioning those nets
meant barefoot walking at night--and eventually marked every bird with
a wing tag. Natalie took photographs of all the
“apartments” so each bird could have an “address,” and as kinship became
known, the Emlens and their assistants
made flash cards identifying who was related to whom. Hiding behind blinds
for most of the day, focusing on one or
two apartments at a time, they could see whether birds would go in with
food or without, and who greeted whom at the
entrance. Natalie invented a sort of ornithological periscope made with
dental mirrors, a light, and a battery pack worn
around the waist; with it, they could peek inside the deep, foul-smelling
burrows to see who was home.
They watched nests with eggs nonstop for two days, watched the same nests
again when the hatchlings were young,
and then again when the chicks were nearly ready to leave. “So we had rigorous
information from three different
ages,” Emlen says, “and we’d have those same data for lots of different
nests.” Every evening they returned to their
house, ate a late supper, talked about who was visiting whom, about courtships,
births, and deaths, and eventually
trespassing, bullying, subtle deceit--all of which grew more exciting as
tensions and conflicts became more apparent.
“It was like watching a soap opera, or the Hitchcock movie Rear Window,”
says Natalie. Then Stephen would spend
hours at night transcribing the tapes they had made in the field and deciding
which apartments to watch the next day.
Meanwhile they developed genealogies, which they confirmed with molecular
tests. Eventually, Emlen says, “you
have a whole database on the survival of everybody--a database on who has
socially interacted with whom and who
has aggressed whom, a database on contributions to the nest, a database
on who dispersed and moved between
colonies, a database on where they go for their feeding and how successful
they are as foragers.” Back at Cornell,
Natalie and Wrege helped Emlen link all those databases and crunch the
numbers.
The longer they studied the bee-eaters, the more they realized that what
seemed like simple altruism was based on
complex evolutionary calculations. Early on, for example, Emlen discovered
that if a nest failed (if a predator ate the
eggs, say), a son who was helping at the nest commonly moved into a different
apartment and continued helping over
there. Emlen thought at first the bird was helping unrelated neighbors,
but after several years, as he built up
genealogies, he realized that bee-eaters live in large, multigenerational
families of up to 17 members that occupy many
apartments. Each bird spends a good deal of time visiting parents, grandparents,
uncles and aunts, cousins, nieces, and
nephews.
“They all know each other, they all greet each other, they exclude nonfamily
members. So what I missed is that
virtually every helper was shifting over to another family member. If your
parents’ nest failed-- boom--you jumped
over to your brother and sister-in-law. Or if a breeder’s nest failed,
it would go over and help its son and
daughter-in-law rear grandchildren.
“As soon as you have an extended family,” Emlen continues, “the game becomes
much trickier.” Each bird has
many more choices of whom to help--father, aunt, grandmother, cousin, and
so on. Since Emlen knew the calculus that
Hamilton had worked out, he thought he should be able to predict who would
help whom, and when. “If a nest fails, I
should be able to predict the number two backup that gets the help.” He
thought he could also predict the point at
which the cost exceeded the benefit and the helper wouldn’t bother. And
it turned out, he says, that every prediction
was “incredibly true. Whether you helped or whether you sat out the season
was very much predicted on closeness of
kinship. The likelihood of helping just falls off--boom, boom, boom, boom,
boom--as the relationship decreases.”
Emlen began to perceive a vast web of selfish--as well as cooperative--behavior.
For example, female bee-eaters will
sometimes try to lay their eggs in the nests of unrelated birds so that
they themselves don’t have to expend the effort
required to raise their young--a phenomenon called nest parasitism. “They
can lay an egg in a few minutes and be
out. Most of these parasitisms come from outside the family.” Mothers and
fathers have counterstrategies: they take
turns guarding their chamber, and they repel anyone but a family member.
If they are both gone from the nest at the
same time for a few minutes and return to find a new egg, they throw it
out. And a day or two after they lay their eggs,
it’s too late for a parasite to sneak in one more. Once the parents’ own
eggs hatch, they stop incubating the foreign
laggard. “So a parasite has to get in right around laying time,” Emlen
explains--which is not easy.
Unless, he discovered, it’s an inside job, done by someone who has access
to the nest and the trust of the parents: in
other words, by a mateless helper daughter. “The daughter has the whole
defense mechanism cracked. She’s taking
her turn defending against anybody else. She can synchronize her timing
with her mother. So she’s got the timing
down, she has access to the nest--she can beat her parents, whereas an
external parasite can’t.”
The only hitch would seem to be that the daughter isn’t paired. But by
monitoring daughters carefully, Emlen
discovered the full dimension of their sneakiness. Bee-eaters travel a
mile or two from their nests to feeding territories
where they catch insects. And there, Emlen says, they saw a daughter behave
“in a way we have never seen any other
time. She just leaves and trespasses on the territory of another family.”
At first they drive her away. “But after doing
this for a while, the male on whose territory she is stops aggressing and
copulates with her.”
Emlen was stunned. “Whoa,” he remembers thinking, “birds are doing this
kind of strategic thing?” That one
example, he says, “opened our eyes to the fact that some very subtle, tactical
social things are going on, and maybe we
had been much too naive in thinking of birds as little simplistic automata.”
The older birds were no angels. When young birds tried to pair off and
start their own families, their parents or other
older relatives would often harass them--essentially choking them with
kindness. “When the younger birds are
paired,” Emlen says, “and they’re starting to dig their own chamber, there’s
a high level of ‘friendly’ interference.”
An older relative will guard the entrance--very helpful, you might think--but
will refuse to recognize the
daughter-in-law, who can’t get in. Or a dominant relative might pay frequent
visits to a young male whenever he tries
to feed his mate. A father, for example, might trespass onto the adjacent
territory of his son and daughter-in-law “and
greet them and greet them and greet them. What’s happening is he’s disrupting
the son’s ability to feed his mate.”
There is, according to Emlen, a calculated strategy hiding underneath this
annoying behavior. By harassing their
younger relatives, these bee-eaters increase the chances that the new nests
will fail and the young birds will return
home to serve as helpers. After all, if they themselves can’t lay eggs,
the next best way to spread their genes is to go
back home and help Mom and Dad.
Until they were deeply involved in the system, Emlen says, they would have
completely misunderstood all these
“friendly” gestures. “Ironically, the individuals you have the most leverage
over to harass are your closest
subordinate relatives. And that can also be mathematically modeled, in
terms of exactly who you should harass. So we
see brothers occasionally doing it to younger brothers, grandparents occasionally
doing it to grandsons, but mostly
it’s fathers harassing their sons. So there’s a lot going on below the
surface of this harmonious, altruistic picture--all
sorts of tugs-of-war.”
It’s a complicated scenario, and figuring out what is the optimally selfish
way to behave in any given situation is not
easy, even for a human--Emlen needed a huge amount of data and a computer
to test his predictions of bee-eater
strategies. So how could lowly, birdbrained bee- eaters work out the same
calculations so precisely? Apparently,
natural selection has already done the computing for them, through many
thousands of years of trial and error.
“Suppose we have several bee-eaters,” Emlen says, and they all have systems
for weighing the relative importance of
their various kin. Now suppose one of them weighs a certain kinship more
heavily than another does. If it’s a bit more
likely to feed a grandson, say, than it is to feed a cousin, “that will
have consequences on the success of rearing those
kids, and have impacts on the number of gene copies down the pike.” If
the genetic payoff is better for helping a
grandson than a cousin, then the genetically based system that recognizes
grandsons survives, while the one that
predisposes the bird to help cousins gradually wanes. Eventually the helping
behavior of a bird species will become
fine-tuned to the opportunities its particular family structure allows.
Emlen is quick to point out that the result of this natural selection is
not a rigid, deterministic set of reflexes. “We’re
not talking about the evolution of a gene for altruism. It isn’t the behavior
per se the gene is regulating.” The gene--or
rather, a complex of many genes--is instead regulating the ability to evaluate
social situations. An animal might
develop genes that help it distinguish its kin by sight, smell, memory,
tail-quivering password, or all of the above. And
that complex of genes might include some that pump up different hormones
for different emotions, according to
what’s perceived. All this would raise the odds of behaving in a certain
way without making that behavior totally
gene-driven. With so much of neurobiology yet to be understood, Emlen treats
the specific chains of genes,
hormones, and other triggers for behavior as nothing more than a black
box. He prefers to call them decision rules.
“It’s as if you have a toolbox of all sorts of behaviors,” Emlen says,
and what natural selection fine-tunes is “the
ability to choose the right behavior from the toolbox and use it in the
right context.”
As he watched the family sagas of bee-eaters play out, Emlen says, he increasingly
came to see the families as very
humanlike. “And so, right or wrong, I got to thinking more and more about
the fact that bee- eaters were structured
that way. I didn’t know it when I started out. Bee- eaters are monogamous,
they have about 85 percent fidelity
rates--higher than humans currently but in the same ballpark, in the last
two centuries at least. The parallels go on and
on--there is divorce. Pairs that are unsuccessful in their early reproductive
attempts have higher probabilities of
divorce.”
The similarities are even more striking when you consider that for hundreds
of thousands of generations, our
ancestors, like bee-eaters, probably lived in large extended families.
In prehistoric societies, people were probably
surrounded from birth to death by uncles and aunts, parents and grandparents,
brothers and sisters, and all their
relatives’ children. And with limited resources from hunting and gathering,
many of the tensions between relatives
over the raising of children (and the solutions they reached) may have
mirrored those found among bee-eaters.
The extended human family survived even the huge changes wrought in the
way people lived by the agricultural
revolution. Only in the past few centuries did it begin to disintegrate.
In many countries, technological and economic
factors like wealth and mobility have caused families to dwindle down to
the nuclear, Ozzie-and-Harriet form and then
keep dwindling, with single-parent families becoming more common. (In the
full sweep of human evolution, both
these forms of the family are abnormal.) The same forces are creating more
stepfamilies than ever before, which, in an
evolutionary sense, amounts to the same thing as the single- parent family:
fewer close genetic relatives living together.
Yet as we try to adjust to these new kinds of families, we still carry
with us the unconscious decision rules we evolved
over hundreds of thousands of years in extended families.
Stepfamilies--human or otherwise--are one of Emlen’s favorite examples.
“The prediction on the straight selfish-gene
logic,” he says, “is that we should see a real change in behavior” after
a “mate change.” Let’s say the kids remain
with their mother, and a stepfather comes into the picture. If the mother
and stepfather have children, her original kids
should be less willing to help raise them, because half-brothers and sisters
share only 25 percent of their genes.
That’s the same as nieces and nephews, so moving out to help a brother
and sister-in-law should be equally likely.
Also, older kids should be more likely to leave the family altogether,
because the payoff for staying decreases.
Years ago Emlen started testing these predictions among bee- eaters by
watching what happened when long-term
mates split apart and chose new ones. The probability of kids helping raise
hatchlings produced by their own parent
and a step-parent dropped, while their probability of shifting over to
help others in the extended family increased, and
their probability of leaving the family altogether increased. “The kids
from the first pairing say, ‘Thank you, no. I’m
doing much less, provisioning much less. I’m going to spend much more time
over there with my other family
members.’”
Does the same logic apply to families across the animal kingdom? Emlen
is now trying to create a unified theory of
family behavior, one that can explain the family dynamics to be found in
humans, other mammals, insects, and birds.
In this magnum opus, Emlen synthesizes not only his own work but the labors
of a whole generation of biologists
who have studied family behavior in vertebrates ranging from fish to birds
to mammals, including humans. In a
preliminary version--“An Evolutionary Theory of the Family,” which appeared
in Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences in 1995--he managed to summarize in only seven pages
every kind of family situation any
novelist could imagine. A table of 15 predictions covers the likely behaviors:
helping, infanticide, sexual conflict,
dispersal. In that paper he explains his work in plain English; now he’s
working on the next version, which will be a
set of formulas that any behaviorist can test by plugging in data.
Why do families form in the first place? It’s in the theory. Families form
when there are limited resources and limited
opportunities for successfully mating and raising kids. Families are also
inherently unstable. In plentiful times,
maturing offspring are more likely to strike out on their own than stay
home as helpers. And yet rich families are
more stable than poor families. If a family of mongooses controls an exceptionally
good hunting territory, for
instance, the offspring are more likely to delay reproducing and will instead
hang around helping the elders, because
the prospects of inheriting the family goodies look so much better than
the prospects of trying to raise kids while
claiming and defending a new territory.
Who will help whom among families, and when? It’s in the theory. Almost
every species among the hundreds that
have been studied follows Hamilton’s selfish-gene logic to the letter,
whether the creatures live in bizarre families like
those of bees (sisters, sisters, which one of you zillions is not my sister?),
or family structures more familiar to us, like
the bee-eaters. What happens when a “replacement mate” enters the family?
It’s in the theory. The payoff of staying
at home goes down for children, while new sexual tensions arise. Stepfamilies
will therefore be less stable than intact
biological families.
There is precious little information about humans that can be used to judge
whether Emlen’s predictions capture our
family life as well. But what statistics there are are supportive. Human
stepparents invest less in offspring from
previous pairings, and children in stepfamilies are more likely to be physically
abused. There’s more conflict between
stepsiblings than biological siblings, as well as the opposite: the stepkids
just don’t interact--they ignore one another.
Stepchildren leave home earlier. And stepparents commit infanticide at
a rate 60 times higher than biological parents.
Emlen spends much of his time now traveling from conference to conference
to make his case for an evolutionary
view of family problems, and one objection he often hears is that birds,
the source of his most convincing data, are too
different from humans to be used as a model. “People can accept primates,”
he says, “but birds, for crying out loud?
It’s as if there’s a cement wall that people can’t cross. And I see my
role as breaking that wall. We may be able to
learn more from ‘lower’ animals than we think.” Obviously, we are closer
biologically to the other primates. “They
are,” Emlen grants, “excellent models for mental capabilities and cognition.”
But their families are not like ours.
Chimpanzees, for example, live in troops in which males play no role in
raising their offspring.
“It’s birds that are overwhelmingly monogamous and form pair- bonds,” Emlen
argues. “It’s birds where males
play a role in parental care. This is not a typical primate trait at all.
Animals that live in very similar types of societies
will have had long evolutionary histories of encountering the same types
of social choices” and therefore will have
developed very similar rules for how to behave. And the best examples of
extended family-based societies that Emlen
knows of are the bee-eaters.
Knowing how our own genes have predisposed us to act, Emlen tells his audiences,
can help us cope with old-family
behaviors that come bursting out of our modern, new-family containers.
“These behaviors are going to be difficult to
change,” he warns, “if they are in fact evolutionary. But they are predispositions,
not determined, which means they
can be consciously overcome.”
One way to reduce the tension between our evolutionary history and modern
family life would be to manipulate our
social environment. Emlen isn’t advocating legislating ourselves back into
a Pleistocene family structure. But it might
be helpful, he muses, to offer a tax break to grandparents if they sell
their condo in Arizona and move back to the town
where their grandchildren live, to pitch in and help raise them.
Another approach is to recognize how certain family situations can turn
into flash points for violence and abuse. One
of the most explosive situations, Emlen suggests, may be a stepparent coming
into a family with a sexually mature son
or daughter. “Sexual abuse in stepfamilies is much higher, about eight
times higher, than in biologically intact
families,” he says. “The same thing happens in birds. When a new mate comes
in, there had been no sexual interest
whatsoever between a son and his mother. There is great interest between
the son and his stepmother, and great
aggression as the father attacks the son, the father guards the mate. The
human data show analogous trends.”
Consider a newly remarried mother, for instance, who has a teen-age daughter.
Even with the best intentions, Emlen
says, “there is going to be a higher probability of subsurface tension
and competition--though you might deny it
constantly-- between that daughter and the mother, vis-à-vis the
stepfather. Knowing this, anticipating this, saying this
is natural, seeing why it may all have come about, I think can help defuse
the flash point.”
Of course, you can’t defuse what you don’t anticipate. Emlen would like
families and counselors to accept the greater
likelihood of conflict in stepfamilies. “A statistically greater chance,”
he says, “does not mean that every family is
going to have these problems, but people might be counseled to expect problems
and prepare for them. We are a
species that has the ability to consciously overcome predispositions that
we feel are inappropriate. And counseling is
better than a surprise. I can have my antennae out, I can be more alert.
I can nip most of these problems in the bud.”
Aside from flash points, stepparents also find themselves having to cope
with a lingering sense of guilt. “As I talk to
social scientists and read the literature,” Emlen says, “there’s a lot
of information about parents in stepfamilies
feeling guilty because they just don’t engender the same emotional feelings
toward the stepchildren as toward their
own. This is precisely what you’d expect.” Understanding the evolutionary
pressures that make us feel differently
toward biological children and stepchildren can help one handle the challenge
of making a stepfamily work. “It helps
you realize you have to go the extra mile, that biology is not going to
help you.”
Ultimately, Emlen hopes that we will be able to deal with evolution’s influence
on our behavior in much the same way
medicine deals with genetic vulnerabilities. If you have an inherited disposition
for hypertension, you cut down on
salt; if you enter a family situation that tends to lead to unhappy endings,
you can look for counterstrategies.
“At first it sounds ominous,” says Emlen, “saying that if you’re in this
kind of family situation, you’re in trouble.
But I argue that it should be empowering. Knowledge should be empowering.”