Military sexual misconduct due to 'biological wiring,' Gen. Tom Lawson tells CBC News
The public reaction the general's comments has left my confidence in the scientific literary and capacity for rational discourse of the Canadian public badly shaken.
There is little doubt among biologists and anthropologists today that humans are innately violent. The Blank Slate Myth, so thoroughly taken apart by Stephen Pinker in his book of the same name, seems to have made the leap from Humanities and Social Sciences departments of modern universities and become public orthodoxy.
It's troubling when so many cannot distinguish between an explanation for behaviour and an excuse of that behaviour, and where rational discourse on the subject of human behaviour becomes impossible owing to narrow dogma and a hostility to empiricism and uncomfortable truths.