In the case of an emergency.....

I am reading a book called "Stiff: The Mysterious lives of Human Cadavers." It talks about the different ways cadavers are studied and the history behind different medical advances. It is a very interesting book.
One chapter in particular talks about Airplane Crashes. It explains the different ways to die from an airplane crash, and it explains how they can identify which of these ways each person died by simply examining their body.
One thing that I learned that didn't alltogether surprise me, but came as sort of a shock, was that if you are a man, your chance of survival is twice as high. Why is that? It is because in the case of an emergency men can physically dominate over women and make it to the safest area first.
If only there could be order in the middle of an emergency instead of chaos, less would go wrong and more people could avoid potential injuries or even death. Everybody knows and has heard the standard rules in the case of any emergency: Keep calm, don't panic, obey those in charge, stay orderly, etc. If everybody can list these off in their sleep, why isn't this ever the atmosphere at the scene of an emergency!?
Perhaps the main cause of this reaction is that in the case of an emergency like this, our lymbic system kicks in. This is called "Fight or Flight" syndrome. This supposedly developed with the cavemen; if they didn't have a sudden burst of adrenaline etcetera when a mammoth was chasing them down, they wouldn't be able to either run really fast to get away or fight to the death.
Maybe it isn't completely our fault that we let our prefrontal cortexes turn control of our decision making over to the lymbic system. And maybe it isn't really guys' fault that they become dominant in plane crashes....after all, if all our lymbic systems are flaring, we're all going to be fighting to get to the safest area. Guys are stronger most of the time, so they win.
Oh, well.....most of plane crashes occur on either take off or landing, and about95% of those crashes aren't fatal. I'm not too worried!