Will Ideology Trump Science?

Scientific researchers (e.g., not campus activists wearing ideological blinders) from Harvard and the University of Chicago have found that 5% of humans have what researchers call "intermittent explosive disorder" (IED). People with IED are susceptible to uncontrollable anger attacks.

But new brain-imaging studies show that people with IED have abnormal brain signaling in areas that control anger responses, Coccaro said. When people with rage disorder are shown pictures of people with angry faces, their amygdala lights up far more than is seen in healthy subjects. The amygdala, deep in the center of the brain, governs emotional responses to threats.

At the same time, the front portion of their brain, which serves as an executive control over emotional urges, is less active than in normal people, Coccaro said, indicating that people with IED quickly lose control.

"People with this problem have a low threshold for exploding and that's probably genetically and biologically mediated," he said.

IED and a few other likely candidate personality disorders, usually combined with drugs and/or alcohol, are likely the cause of most domestic violence, not "patriarchal control and oppression." Domestic violence is much less prevalent than the old "1 in 3" myth propagated by graduates of Women Studies departments around the country and females are not the only victims.

While the onset of IED seems to start younger for boys than girls (13 vs. 19), there is no indication that one sex is more prone to have this problem than another. For both sexes, IED seems to fade with age.

Scientific evidence that debunks DV mythology continues to pile up. That doesn't matter much to Rebecca Cohn of the California General Assembly, who is pushing AB 2051 to ensure that ony women receive victim services for domestic violence. That goes against the language of VAWA III, which specifically states that VAWA funding must be neutral of sex.

When ideology trumps science as it does with gender feminist pork, one has to wonder what really drives global warming hysteria.