Commentary on the Chapter by Ferdinand Rivera, “Neural Correlates of Gender, Culture, and Race and Implications to Embodied Thinking in Mathematics”

Abstract

What differences in gender, culture, and race can be attributed to the biological evolution of the species, and what differences in gender, culture, and race can be attributed to social interaction? Such a polarized question is well posed only if these areas of attribution, biology and sociology, are independent of each other. A moment’s reflection may suggest that biological evolution and social interaction in the human species are to a large extent co-dependent. There are many distinctions that are but distinctions in thought and perception, and not independent in fact—and there are those who take the co-dependent arising of all things as a matter of fact. Be this as it may, some differences may predate others. For instance, sexual differences in humans may predate social interaction. However, the biological emergence of sexual differences in species may also be seen as an important affordance, perhaps even a sine qua non, for social interaction. Beyond and even within the constraints of kinship, social interaction, for better or for worse, must be predicated, for the most part of our evolutionary history, on biological differences of various kinds, covering wide spectra of attractions and repulsions. Through the means of agriculture and industry, and with continued advances in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology, humans have evolved to a point where social interaction can take place in purely semiotic and ideational terms, independently of biological characteristics. Whereas symbols and signs are visible, ideas are not (Merleau-Ponty 1968). Or are they?