Racialism

Race is not an accurate or productive way to describe human biological variation. Racialism is the idea that humanity can be easily divided into well-defined biological categories ("races") that are both broad (each category should include many humans, such as entire continents' populations) and clearly-defined (the categorization method should rarely misidentify someone's "race"). Racialism implies that these races are substantially physiologically different from each other and that these racial differences strongly determine the abilities and behavior of individuals and peoples. Essentially, racialism argues that human populations are substantially different from each other to a degree which necessitates biological classification similar to or below the species level. In short, racialism holds that ethnicity has a biological component in addition to the sociocultural one.

This pseudoscience is technically not the same as racism, which is the belief that one or more of these various groups is "superior" or "inferior" to one or more others, usually in some vague, undefined way. But while racism and racialism are distinct concepts, their respective adherents do overlap a lot more than either would have you believe.

Very few racialists call themselves "racialist". Their preferred labels include scientific racism (pre2000), race realism or racial realism (post2000), and human biodiversity or HBD (post2010).

Racialism first developed in the 1700s. It remained virtually unchallenged until the 1930s-1960s, when genetics showed it to be erroneous. The idea that humans could be neatly divided into races had long been fraught. Charles Darwin noted in 1871 that there was no clear consensus on how many races there are, writing of 13 authors each making different estimates ranging from 2 to 63. Only in 1962 was the idea first proposed that human variation is continuous.

Simply put, modern racialism is pseudoscientific bullshit.

Human biological variation

 * To deny the existence of subspecies in Homo sapiens is not to deny biological variation between populations; there is human population structure.
 * Misrepresenting anti-racialism as the position that "all human populations are identical" or there are "no differences between populations" is a common tactic among racialists.

Populations (demes)
Human individuals (of opposite sexes) do not randomly reproduce because of geographical constraints: " never happens in humans, nor in other animals, for a very simple reason: if nothing else, space exerts a passive restraint on who mates with whom" (for example imagine a man and a woman living 1000 miles apart), but there are also equally important cultural barriers that prevent random mating. In population genetics, a "population" is defined in terms of mating propensity: breeding populations or demes, are defined as "a group of interbreeding individuals that exist together in time and space", or: "a collection of interbreeding individuals of the same species that live in sufficient proximity that they share a common system of mating", or more simply: "a group from within which mates are typically chosen".

Demes should not be confused with races. Typically, demes are very small and localised breeding near-isolates, including tribes, rural village populations and ethno-religious groups such as the Lancaster Amish, that have a very high rate of endogamy, although minimal gene flow still exists, somewhat blurring the boundaries of each deme:

Population genetics
The persistence of geographical and/or cultural barriers between demes over many generations has led to genetic (and phenotypic) differences. The biologist Jonathan Marks describes these populations as the "small biopackages" of human variation, but cautions that overall differences between populations are small, hence his position is "populations are biologically real, not races". In population genetics, these differences are analysed by mean variation in a large number of allele (variant of a gene) frequencies, or a smaller number of with disparate frequencies. There is no formal classification of human demes because taxonomy takes no notice of breeding populations (the only infraspecific category is the subspecies or race); deme is though the operational unit in population genetics to study evolution (i.e. genetic change over generations).

In their publication The History and Geography of Human Genes, Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi & Piazza (1994) include genetic samples from 491 breeding populations from across the globe; the authors note that "changes in means of transportation and labour opportunities have of course altered profoundly marriage customs" and found that "an increase in geographic distance between birth of mates" somewhat complicated their study. More recently, Cavalli-Sforza (2005) has worked on the Human Genome Diversity Project that includes genetic samples from 52 ethnic groups from different continents. The status of these ethnic groups as demes is questionable because of their larger size in terms of numbers of individuals and more vague boundaries. Cavalli-Sforza recognises this issue; for example Han Chinese, who number more than a billion individuals and who live across the entirety of China, he does not consider a single breeding population. In the case HGDP samples from small-size ethnic groups restricted to local areas, e.g. (1000),  (4000),  (8000),  (18000),  (20000), and  (25000), these are less problematic and are probably recognisable as demes.

The biologist John Relethford throughout his work stresses that population genetics should focus on micro-size populations because these reflect actual mating behaviours; a larger number of individuals across more space is likely to contain different breeding populations. As explained by Jonathan Marks in a 2010 article: "larger units than the deme lack cohesion... to adopt a unit of analysis of human biology larger than that of the local population or deme, then, is what requires some justification today". Like Relethford and Cavalli-Sforza et al., Marks goes on to deny the validity of aggregating demes into too broad divisions (large countries and continents); firstly since their boundaries are too arbitrary, and secondly because they have too many individuals (with different tendencies of assortative mating or endogamy) and so they are not useful. Relethford (2017) concludes by saying:

Clines
There are no races, there are only clines. Interpopulation variation is mostly continuous, and the arbitrary categorization of humans into races is therefore neither useful nor an accurate method in analyzing biological variation. Instead, modern biologists and physical anthropologists tend to study

Clines replaced the race concept from the 1960s. In their work Race or Clines?, Lieberman & Rice (1996) write that the rise of the cline concept was one of several facts that "laid low the concept of race".

The word "cline" derives from the Greek word for slope and the smooth gradient or continuity of a given trait across geographic space is known as a clinal distribution. As Lieberman 2003 explains:

Scientific viewpoint
Modern scientific consensus is strongly against the race concept, though this was not always the case. In contrast, biological evidence for racialism has always been relatively weak, and modern evidence conclusively shows that racialism is fundamentally flawed.

Scientific consensus: Races aren't useful
[B]oundaries in global variation are not abrupt and do not fit a strict view of the race concept; the number of races and the cutoffs used to define them are arbitrary. The race concept is at best a crude first-order approximation to the geographically structured phenotypic variation in the human species. Major institutions with expertise have come down against the biological usefulness of race:

DNA studies do not indicate that separate classifiable subspecies (races) exist within modern humans. While different genes for physical traits such as skin and hair color can be identified between individuals, no consistent patterns of genes across the human genome exist to distinguish one race from another. There also is no genetic basis for divisions of human ethnicity.

For centuries, scholars have sought to comprehend patterns in nature by classifying living things. The only living species in the human family, Homo sapiens, has become a highly diversified global array of populations. The geographic pattern of genetic variation within this array is complex, and presents no major discontinuity. Humanity cannot be classified into discrete geographic categories with absolute boundaries. Furthermore, the complexities of human history make it difficult to determine the position of certain groups in classifications. Multiplying subcategories cannot correct the inadequacies of these classifications.

With the vast expansion of scientific knowledge in this century, however, it has become clear that human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups. Evidence from the analysis of genetics (e.g., DNA) indicates that most physical variation, about 94%, lies within so-called racial groups. Conventional geographic "racial" groupings differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes. This means that there is greater variation within "racial" groups than between them. In neighboring populations there is much overlapping of genes and their phenotypic (physical) expressions. Throughout history whenever different groups have come into contact, they have interbred. The continued sharing of genetic materials has maintained all of humankind as a single species.

Scientific consensus follows the above statements. Lieberman and Reynolds first attempted to determine scientific consensus on the concept of race in 1978. The number of racialist researchers has continuously declined since then. This can easily be seen in the decline of papers using the race concept. For example, the percent of variation articles in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology that use the race concept dropped from ~70% in the 1910's to ~15% in the 1990's.



A 2012 survey of 3,286 American Anthropological Association members found very strong agreement that the conventional concept of race is not scientifically useful. The first 10 of questions are reproduced below:

It should be clear that anthropologists disagree with the race concept. They do so because of anthropological and genetic evidence, presented below.

Background: Comparison with animals
There are two major scientific definitions of race in animals, as Templeton 2013 explains. The first is "geographically isolated & genetically different subpopulations":

Note: Templeton misrepresents Smith 1997 on the 75% rule, which refers to phenotypic rather than genetic differences. There's no hard-set rule for the exact FST cutoff, though 25% is commonly used.

The second is "evolutionarily independent subpopulations":

Both of these concepts are rejected within the human species.

Definition One: Human gene clusters don't divide neatly into geographical groupings
If human races are geographically delimited populations characterized by regionally distinctive phenotypes that do not occur elsewhere in significant numbers, then races no longer exist and have probably not existed for centuries, if ever. Human genetics doesn't work like racialists think it does. Race realists spend a great deal of time and effort pointing out genetic differences between geographically separated populations in gene clustering research and insisting this is evidence for "races".

In scientific work, gene clustering research in a set of populations is typically determined via subjective descriptors of ethnicity, language and geography. In this way, people can be reliably identified as members of these groups. However, this way of categorizing people depends fundamentally on the quantity and method used to create the aforementioned framework of ancestral populations; how people are grouped into populations is completely arbitrary.

In contrast, racialism relies upon the idea that large clusters of people who are homogeneous within the cluster and heterogeneous between clusters in terms of genetic similarity exist. However, this idea has no scientific basis and in fact there is evidence against it, as Witherspoon et al. concluded in their 2007 paper "Genetic Similarities Within and Between Human Populations". As Maglo et al. 2016 write:

"Clusters" of very high genetic similarity can be -- purposefully or accidentally -- "created" via inadequate sampling of intermediate populations. In this case, three "races" are obtained (blue, purple, red) even though the overall system shows no such breaks (Maglo et al. 2016):



The above distinctions should be made clear when comparing a racialist map of the world (left), the scientific clinal map of the world (center), and human Y-chromosome (right). Note first that in the clinal map there are no sharp variations, only gradual changes, with innumerable "intermediary" cases between any two colors. Note second that the clinal map has some "fractal-ness": not only is there variation across locations (eg, Africa and Asia), but there is variation within locations (eg, Africa), and so no region is one homogeneous group.

In short: There are no sharply defined "jumps" of genetic difference between humans, and so no reason to have sharply defined races of humans.

Rosenberg et al. 2005
A study often cited by racialists as evidence there are continental races is Rosenberg et al. 2005. Rosenberg and colleagues claimed to have discovered a very small percentage of genetic variation (1.53%) is found between continents, i.e. "discontinuous jumps in genetic distance—across oceans, the Himalayas, and the Sahara". However their study only used 52 population samples. Notably no samples were included from the Sahara nor Himalayas, therefore it is not a surprise their study erroneously found genetic discontinuity between continents by poor sampling:

With a lot more population samples, Tishkoff et al. (2009) found no genetic discontinuity between the Saharan desert and Sahel, instead a genetic continua runs "across northern Africa into Mali (the Dogon)" (see also Serre & Pääbo, 2004).

Definition One: Human phenotypes don't divide neatly into geographical groupings
And if races are not geographically delimited, then racial classificatory categories are merely labels for polymorphisms that vary in frequency from one part of the world to another, like redheadedness or Type A blood. If "Negroid" and "Caucasoid" people occur on every continent, it makes no more sense to describe these groupings as geographical subspecies than it would to describe redheads or people with Type A blood as human subspecies. Expressed genes turn into phenotypes, the actual manifestation of differences. Phenotype is, at times, fairly close to genotype and, thus, might fit into the genetics of race. However, it too is a flawed metric.

As a case study: The highest level of long-distance runners comes not just from Kenya, but a particular part of Kenya and their success is defined, in part, by common genetics. But that isn't race. In fact, the opposite end of the running spectrum, sprinters, features a large proportion with ancestral origins in West Africa. Both sets of genes favor running, but entirely different aspects of it. By these genes alone, the two groups might appear to be different races, even while our knee-jerk appearance-based definitions put them in the same race.

Applying the same technique as Witherspoon, Strauss and Hubbe analyzed data of head shape and found that, across three regions that correspond to three common racial definitions, a typical person in any region was about 30% likely to be more similar to someone from a different region than to someone within their own region. In other words, head shape, one defining factor of race, does not correspond consistently to geographical heritage in the way it would be expected were genetic differences determinant of race. In even shorter words, the genotype may be similar among a race, but phenotype is less similar. This may explain how one white supremacist was so surprised to discover his African heritage.

Definition Two: Human races are not evolutionarily independent
Racialist views oversimplify the complicated history of humanity. For example, the racialist (left) paints evolutionary lineages with very broad brushes. This effectively hides the smaller human evolutionary groups that can easily be seen in a scientific tree diagram (center). In comparison, the "trellis" diagram (right) most correctly shows the substantial amounts of inter-continental gene admixture that has occurred throughout human history.

Genetic evidence: Race does not predict human variation well
If race were more than just a social construct, the genetics of race should show differences strongly associated with the definitions of race. The easiest distinctions come from things like skin color, hair, and eye shape which, yes, are genetically based, but the surface commonality is not enough to justify racial stereotypes. For those stereotypes to be true, the genetics of race have to extend deeper.

However, modern genetic data has demonstrated the vast majority of variation (>85%) is found within populations, rather than between them (<15%). Of the latter, <10% is found between large continental groups of ethnic groups/demes (such as "white" or "black" or "Asian").

It is possible to compare the variation of various phenotypic markers (eg, skull structure) genetic markers (ie, DNA patterns) within populations and between populations. The vast majority of these studied differences have yielded low rates of deviation between races and between ethnic groups. This suggests that the vast majority of deviation actually occurs within populations, rather than between populations. In turn, this casts serious doubt on the term "race" having any meaning whatsoever -- if the vast majority of variation is within populations, then it makes little sense to categorize each population. As the below table of scientific studies of differences between human population groups (Taken in part from Ruvolo & Seielstad 2001 ) should show, it is the case that the vast majority of variation occurs within populations.

This is not to say that there is no variation between humans. As the above table should make clear, it's quite the opposite. Indeed, genetic data does show that random people sampled from within a population are generally more similar to each other than a pair sampled from different populations. (That's hardly surprising since, when left to their own devices, people tend to procreate with local folk more than with folk from another part of the world.) Moreover, with enough genetic information (i.e. more than 1000 genetic loci), it is possible to quite accurately identify the geographic origin of a sampled person's ancestors, but only when the chosen regions are quite distinct. (Or: Icelanders and Ashkenazi Jews might be genetic clusters, but "Caucasians", "Mongoloids", and "Negroes" are not). However, Witherspoon 2007 cautions:

In other words: Just because variation exists does not mean it is meaningful. As the above sections about race in animals should make clear, a little variation does not a race make.

Definitional issues
[W]hile some minimal revision to the meaning of 'race' [...] is allowable in the search for biological backing for race, we must stay fairly close to the vest, or we risk not talking about race at all. The main problem is that new concepts of race used by racialists are watered down to the extent they are trivialised. Hochman 2014 writes:

Hochman (2013) rejects these new concepts and re-definitions on the grounds (emphasis added) "the criteria applied to humans are not consistent with those used to define subspecies in nonhuman animals, and no rationale has been given for this differential treatment".

Another problem with re-defining race is: "To avoid making 'race' the equivalent of a local population, minimal thresholds of differentiation are imposed". Modern racialists however argue there is no threshold which runs into the problem of any population being a race: "There are undoubtedly no two genetically identical populations in the world; this has nothing to do directly with the validity of race as a taxonomic device. Unless we have defined exactly what we mean by this… differences between populations are population differences, nothing more." Another objection is a "mismatch argument", where local breeding populations not ordinarily conceived as races (e.g. Amish, or ), become races: "a mismatch occurs between the concept and its typical referent. Thus, the concept of race must be eliminated due to its logical incoherence."

Epigenetics
Along the way from chemistry to expression, the environment gets its chance to intervene. Epigenetics studies the way in which factors outside of the DNA itself alter the way in which genes are expressed. Resembling Lamarckian genetics, epigenetic effects can be remarkable enough for a mouse to pass a specific fear response down at least two generations (F3). In humans, increased risk for cardiovascular disease among African Americans is hypothesized to result from genetic expression modified by in utero experience of maternal stressors. Epigenetic effects might tie socioeconomics to future IQ, explaining some portion of controversially observed racial differences.

Case study: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid
As an example of why arguments for racialism fail, consider the case of the "-oid" concept of race.

Ethnic groups and demes in Africa/East Asia/West Eurasia do not form a sharply discontinuous genetic (or phenotypic) cluster, nor are there substantial differences between populations in East Asia, compared to populations from other regions across the globe. Overall, genetic variation between continental human populations is fairly little (<10%) and does not support the concept of different human races. The terms, however, have continued into modern forensic literature (though they are being phased out even of that).

For several reasons, these types of theories are incredibly flawed.

Capoids and Australoids
realized a major flaw in the 3-oid version of racialism &mdash; Eastern and Southern Africans and aboriginals Australian were black but looked totally fucking different from North Africans. How to fix this? "Negroid" became three races &mdash; (North Africans),  (East or South Africans), and  (aboriginal Australians).

Coon did not, however, figure out what "oid" the Native Americans were. Perhaps racialists of the future will finally create the long-anticipated 6-oid system &mdash; or find out that Native Americans were actually just really tanned Caucasoids.

Reversed hierarchy
Funnily enough, the cranial order was once asserted to be Caucasoid > Mongoloid > Negroid; clearly, whites are the bestest. Nowadays, as racialists have become fond of Asians, the order has shifted to Mongoloid > Caucasoid > Negroid. Perhaps an entire continent of people have simply upgraded their skulls?

Alternate classifications
Why stop with simplistic appearance-based racial classifications? Why not racially classify humans based on other genetic traits that are just as geographically dispersed as skin color?
 * Type B blood: Native Americans (First Nations for residents of Canuckistan) and Aboriginal Australians would form one race while some Africans would form a race with Europeans and other Africans would form a race with Asians.
 * Sickle-cell anemia risk: One race would encompass the major malaria-risk zones of Central and Northern Africa, parts of the Mediterranean, Arabia, and India.
 * Lactase persistence, the ability to digest milk sugar in adulthood: much more common in areas where dairy farming has been practised for thousands of years.
 * Defined by one gene alone, you could divide the world into sprinters (strong RR on ACTN3), long-distance runners (strong RX on ACTN3), and everyone else. Geographically, that's some people with West African heritage, some with East African Heritage, and everyone else.

Race and intelligence
One obsolete theory attempted to link cranial capacity (cc) to intelligence. While cranial capacity is an accurate measure of brain size, the fallacy was in assuming that a larger cranial capacity (and brain) correlates with higher intelligence. The size of the brain itself is only weakly correlated with intelligence. You will no doubt be very surprised that European researchers claimed Europeans had the largest cranial capacity.

If this idea were taken to its logical conclusion, the world would likely be ruled by elephants, or sperm whales. It is only when a person has an extremely small brain, as with abnormal conditions such as that absolute brain size has any negative impact on cognitive functions.

Furthermore, having a very large amount of brain tissue, referred to as megalencephaly, is recognized as being pathological and is strongly correlated with several neurological disorders, especially severe epilepsy and autism. What is much more important than absolute brain size includes factors such as cortical folding, neuronal organization, dendritic and synaptic connections, etc.

A handful of 21st century racialists including figures such as J. Philippe Rushton and Arthur Jensen have continued to argue that certain races are just inherently dumb. While they still like their skull and brain size measurements, their arguments hinge more on pointing to differences in races' average IQ scores and claiming this is the work of genetics. These claims rest on several big assumptions:


 * 1) That IQ is a measure of some kind of objective intelligence, rather than a measure of the skills needed to excel in 21st century Western society (a controversial claim).
 * 2) That there are genetic differences between "races" big enough to explain the IQ difference.
 * 3) That IQ is more dependent on racial genes than environment (or: if environment affects IQ, then the differences in IQ by race should still be significant after controlling for the environment).

Increasingly, evidence has been suggesting that environment plays a large role in IQ. This started with the discovery of the Flynn effect &mdash; the realization that national average IQ scores were increasing over time at a rate much faster than could be explained by genetics (and, interestingly, ethnic minorities were often making the biggest leaps).

Relevant to this discussion also is Eric Turkheimer's study of twins separated at birth and raised in different socioeconomic environments. The study found that environment mattered more to the development of IQ in the poor kids than it did in the rich kids. Essentially, some degree of genetically-determined IQ exists, but the degree to which it develops is dependent on how intellectually-stimulating their environment as children is. Other explanations, such as the   racial discrimination in the education system , lack of funding for schools in poor areas, more talented teachers avoiding teaching at schools in poor areas, and even differences in diet  have been offered.

An irony
Although these IQ-based arguments for racialism are often used by white supremacists, taken to their logical conclusion, they would better support Asian or Jewish supremacy than white supremacy. Rushton actually agrees that Asians, not whites, are the intellectual master race, leading anthropologist Jonathan Marks to remark:

Adaptation doesn't work like that
Adaptation to environments, including social environments, through natural and sexual selection of random mutations is the linchpin of evolution. Remembering this means knowing why scientific racism is ridiculous. To argue that races or ethnic groups differ innately in intelligence, however defined, is exactly equal to an assertion that intelligence has proven less adaptive for some people than for others.

This at minimum requires an explanation, a specifically evolutionary explanation, beyond mere statistical assertion; without that it can be assumed to be cultural bias or noise. Since most human intelligence is in fact social intelligence &mdash; the main thing the human mind is built for is networking in human societies &mdash; this would require this social evolutionary arms race to have somehow stopped.

Genetic differences between people from different locations are pretty much entirely genetic drift (which itself can lead to the appearance of genes that are not expressed anywhere else). Amount of melanin does vary with distance from the equator, and there's recent actual evolution such as Lactase persistence in adults.

Race and sporting ability
There are several common beliefs about how different races have different sporting abilities. Clichés include:
 * Blacks are good at track and field (especially sprinting ) and heavyweight boxing (hence the phrase "The Great White Hope" ).
 * Blacks can't swim.
 * East Africans are good at long-distance running.
 * East Asians are athletically weaker, at least at some sports.
 * Whites are better at tennis. (except the ).
 * Whites can't jump (basketball).

On the other hand, why has Norway (population 5 million) won 132 golds in Winter Olympics and Vietnam and India none? Are Asians intrinsically terrible at skiing compared to tall Nordic types? Or does Norway have more ski slopes and better ice rinks and just care more and spend more money on it? Why has produced more Hall of Fame caliber National Football League (NFL) players than the entire continents of Europe and Asia combined? Is it because Irish-Americans are naturally ? Is it because running and throwing are inherently deficient in Europeans? Or is it because College Football is a huge money making business in exactly one country on Earth?

It appears that some factors implicated in sporting success are heritable (e.g. height), and therefore will be more or less common in groups with common ancestors. However, in many cases, these do not correlate closely to race (the Dutch are the tallest nationality, despite stereotypes about black basketballers). As the section on genetic variation makes clear, there is not a simple pot of genes that corresponds to each race, so you can't assume a member of a race will have a given gene. And there are few clear cases where genes define sporting success: even factors like height are affected by nutrition, medical facilities, etc, and distributed across races.

One well-known genetic factor is the gene ACTN3 associated with fibres, which are greatly beneficial to sprinters and basketball players amongst others, and such genes are particularly common in west Africa. The frequency of the optimum (RR) genotype is 0.25 in Asians, 0.36 in European whites, 0.60 in African-Americans, but 0.81 in African Bantu. This is perhaps the clearest and best known example of sporting behaviour where genetic variation is connected to race, although even then it relates to a particular population rather than an entire race in the old-fashioned concept. The relative frequency of the gene in whites and Africans does not fully explain the fact that 77% of National Basketball Association (NBA) players are black, and blacks have 83% of NBA court time.

It is also important not to confuse genetic heritage with nationality, cultural factors, or social status. There are many non-genetic reasons why people of a certain race, ethnicity, or nationality may choose to play specific sports, or excel at them. These include:
 * economic factors (which may affect everything from nutrition and health, to ability to afford equipment and tuition, and time to train)
 * discrimination (from racist sports clubs restricting membership, to expectations of coaches)
 * environment and climate (where you live may affect what sports you do, along with factors such as heat or cold tolerance or lung capacity developed from living at high altitude)
 * religions or cultural factors (e.g. requirements that women keep their bodies covered, or stay in the home)
 * cultural beliefs about the importance of specific sports or sport in general (anecdotally some cultures celebrate sport as a means to success, while others favour academic achievement at school)
 * Cultural ties of a sport to a certain ethnic group. For instance, within South Africa, Rugby Union was long considered the sport of white Afrikaans speaking people while cricket was considered the sport of white people of English descent with soccer the sport of everybody else. This has only begun to change since Apartheid ended.

Sport science academic Ben Oakley attributes the success of east African long-distance runners partly to their experience at high altitude and partly to the cultural factors that encourage running in east Africa more than in high regions of Latin America. According to Oakley there is no specific genetic factor, but their tendency to light, lean bodies probably helps. None of these are unique to the region, but they combine to produce a greater effect.

Race and medicine
A topic that has been controversial (for both social and scientific reasons) is so-called "race-based medicine." Currently, some doctors may use racial profiling as a proxy for determining the geographic origins of the patient's lineage to diagnose and treat certain diseases. However, this is not the same thing as "race." The researchers at the Human Genome Project sum it up:

The word cline is sometimes used to describe this. To put it more succinctly, as the leader of the Human Genome Project, Francis Collins does:

'Race' and 'ethnicity' are poorly defined terms that serve as flawed surrogates for multiple environmental and genetic factors in disease causation, including ancestral geographic origins, socioeconomic status, education and access to health care.

Clarification: Heuristics versus biology
It should be noted that all human classifications used in medicine are considered probabilistic heuristics and not perfectly deterministic. While research has shown that many people are extremely effective at classifying themselves based on ethnic origin and so researchers may find "race" to be a convenient label, it fails as a source of attribution: "[R]ace as a social construct may result in differences in treatment that affect health outcomes, but such descriptive use does not imply that "race" can be used as a proxy for biological difference."

"Race" will continue to exist as a cultural phenomenon; while great care should be taken in using this construct in medicine, it would be counter-productive to discard potentially useful information, such as the way in which racial identity shapes social, legal and economic outcomes. Unfortunately, the knotty history of "race" makes even the language used a potential source of error &mdash; "race realists" often point to a news headline or study that uses "race" sloppily and declare it to be "evidence" of the truth of "race," mastering sufficient jargon to talk about the reality of "genetic clines" and missing the fundamental mismatch between "race" as culture and "race" as genetic destiny.

Current trends: Against racialism
Even if race was useful or currently is useful, current medicine is moving towards actually looking at people's genetics, rather than their phenotype (race), which is a poor approximation. As Pena 2011 puts it:

Case study: Sickle-cell anemia
Sickle-cell anemia is a famous example of how "race" can mislead. It was originally classified as a "negro disease" due to its high incidence in blacks. However, it was later found that sickle-cell anemia, being an adaptation to the risk of malaria, was also more common in central and western Africans (but not southern Africans) as well as Mediterraneans (Turks, Greeks, etc.) and Indians. Thus, the disease was not an indication of "race," but of geographic ancestry (in this case, areas where malaria was more common).

Race as disease risk categories?
Classification of race in medical genetics (e.g. "Caucasian", "Black") has been criticised on the grounds studies on disease rarely control environmental factors and so a genetic etiology is assumed without testing. That said, no doctor denies that some diseases and found at high frequency in some populations, while low in others and therefore categorisation may provide useful. While information about ethnicity may be informative for biomedical research: "it is imperative to move away from describing populations according to racial classifications such as 'black', 'white' or 'Asian'… there can be considerable genetic heterogeneity within a region, it is most useful to be as specific as possible about geographic origins, ethnicity or tribal affiliation". Those diseases that show considerable inter-group difference, are only confined to local breeding populations, that are often more inbred (e.g. ethno-religious sects such as the Samaritans) rather than large regions, or continents. Dr. Jurgen K. Naggert, a geneticist at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, has noted:

These big groups that we characterize as races are too heterogeneous to lump together in a scientific way. If you're doing a DNA study to look for markers for a particular disease, you can't use 'Caucasians' as a group. They're too diverse.

ApoL1 associated kidney diseases are a lot more common in many populations in Africa than Europe and Asia, to the extent they've been incorrectly described as a 'black disease', but because Africa is a massive continent there are some countries (e.g. Ethiopia) where ApoL1 associated kidney diseases are in fact absent: "ApoL1 risk variants nor the sickle-cell allele are 'black' diseases because many 'black' populations do not have these alleles. Another example, α-thalassemia has a high frequency (80%) in an ethnic group in South Asia (Tharu people in Nepal), but very low in others, so it would be meaningless to talk of an 'Asian disease' (Lewontin, 2006).

Race and forensic anthropology
Racialists quote forensic anthropologists who are said to be able to estimate ancestry of skeletal remains by continent ("race") with an accuracy of up to 90%. For example, a 1986 textbook by forensic anthropologists claimed that race should be determinable from skull morphology alone with an accuracy of 85-90%. The revised version of the textbook did not make such a claim however, and cited Hefner (2009) that "'the lack of a methodological approach' used in these methods, and the fact that there are no error rates associated with ancestry prediction using them. He suggested that they have not been investigated with appropriate scientific and legal considerations in mind, and aspects such as inter-observer repeatability have hardly been considered. … forensic anthropologists claim that they can accurately asses ancestry using these [skeletal] traits, and the actual frequencies of these traits are, in fact, much lower than assumed. … [Ousley (2006)] suggested that analysts make a diagnosis of ancestry based on an overall impression of a skull, and then choose the traits post-hoc to support their assumption as a type of confirmation bias."

Empirical flaws: Sampling bias
The high accuracy figures quoted above only apply to limited subsets of a sample. However, this high accuracy figure only matches limited subsets of a sample in each broad continental grouping, and "in cases where independent samples are used to test the methods, allocation accuracies decrease to levels that undermine the applicability of the methods in actual cases." As such, broad groupings like "Mongoloid" have little to no utility.

Two case studies should drive home this point. First consider Birkby 1966, who found a high allocation accuracy for "Native Americans" (>90%) based on an archaeological sample from Knoll, Kentucky. When however indigenous remains were sampled from many other locations, the accuracy for the "Native American" racial category diminished: "the methods performed poorly on the respective American Indian samples (accuracies ranged from 14 to 30%), and confirmed Birkby’s conclusion that the Indian Knoll sample cannot be considered a proxy for the pattern of variation in numerous populations that are included in the group American Indian".

Similarly, Smay & Armelagos 2000 write:

Empirical flaws: Inconsistent methods
The high accuracy rate claim for racial determination methods is also questionable since different methods have a tendency to produce different results:

Empirical flaws: Gradients of features within races
The fact that there are gradients of features within so-called races is widely recognized and contradicts discrete racial boundaries. As an example, let us consider Asia. According to Wu Rukang and Wu Xinzhi (1997): "The cephalic, facial, and nasal indices, plus stature, show clinal variation. From north to south [China], the cephalic index and the stature are seen to decrease, while the facial and nasal indices increase."

This can easily be seen with an example. Ling & Wong (2008) provide a table of shoveling among East Asian populations, with results for tooth I1 reproduced below:

Full shoveling spans from 85.3% to 3.0% among Chinese populations alone.

Theoretical flaws: Region versus race
Sauer (1992) notes that "to estimate, with varying degrees of specificity, a person’s place of ancestry from their physical features" is "not a vindication of the [biological] race concept".

C. Loring Brace makes the same point that "region, does not mean race". More recently terms such as "geographical ancestry", or "ancestral population" have replaced race in forensic literature.

Motivation of forensic anthropologists
If race is so meaningless, why do so many forensic anthropologists still use it? The simple answer is that laypeople often require them to do so. Smay & Armelagos 2000 write:

"Lewontin's fallacy"
Most modern racialists redefine race as a "genetic cluster" by continent which captures a fairly small amount of variation (<10%) between groups of populations. Molecular anthropologists such as Jonathan Marks are confused by this re-definition because it is so far removed from biological taxonomy, and the traditional meaning of race. Michael P. Muehlenbein writes:

The geographical pattern to human interpopulation variation, matches an almost continuous gradient/isolation-by-distance model  However much of this discontinuity is found within continents, not between them  &mdash; which again renders the ideas of (e.g.) "white" and "black" as irrelevant.

Racialists argue that while overall genetic variation between continental population divisions is <10%, this rather little human population structure still supports race classification (contra Lewontin, 1972 ).

They quote Edwards (2003) who found by looking at how gene loci are correlated: "probability of misclassification falls off as the number of gene loci increases". It is notable Edwards in his paper does not dispute Lewontin's statistical data on various blood polymorphisms, writing: "There is nothing wrong with Lewontin's statistical analysis of variation, only with the belief that it is relevant to classification". As a result, as Marks (2010) explains, there is no "Lewontin fallacy":

Geographical correlations are far weaker hypotheses than genetically discrete races, and they obviously exist in the human species (whether studied somatically or genetically).

What Lewontin (or Marks) and Edwards are discussing are two completely different things. Of course genetic correlations exist which can pinpoint someone's geographical ancestry, but as Marks asks: "What is unclear is what this has to do with race", and concludes: "Lewontin's analysis shows that such groups [races] do not exist in the human species, and Edwards's critique does not contradict that interpretation" (emphasis added). What this means is that Edwards is re-defining the race concept to a far weaker hypothesis, which is not how race is commonly understood in biological taxonomy: Fujimura 2014 writes:

[I]f one wants to measure the meaningfulness of differences between groups with different geographic ancestries, one needs to use a “proportion of variation” approach. This approach compares genetic variation among individuals within groups to the genetic variation between these groups. Ironically, Edwards’s (2003) reported findings confirm Lewontin’s (1972).

What is the significance of the "proportion of variation" (FST) approach? It measures phylogenetic 'treeness' via genetic differentiation i.e. whether populations reflect a common evolutionary history or intraspecific distinctive lineage, which is taxonomically meaningful. Human populations however "have such little structure that ‘treeness’ is not demonstrated and phylogenetic models are invalid". As Lewontin 1974 himself writes:

FST
FST (or the ) is the ratio of the genetic allele variance between different subpopulations (S) the variance within the total population (T):
 * $$ F_{ST} = \frac{\sigma^2_S}{\sigma^2_T} $$

Wright (1978) calculated FST values under 5% indicate little genetic differentiation between populations, 5% to 15%, moderate genetic differentiation, 15% to 25%, great genetic differentiation, and above 25%, very great differentiation which is the threshold for subspecies (races). Human continental population divisions fall at the lower end of moderate genetic differentiation (<10%), while demes and ethnic groups under 5%: "Hence, as judged by the criterion in the nonhuman literature, the human FST value is too small to have taxonomic significance under the traditional [definition of] subspecies".

Muddying the waters
In order to discredit the science against racialism, it is a common racialist tactic to compare race with some other (supposed) biological characteristic. For example, as one commenter on The Right Stuff writes:

The commenter fails to note that human sexes are (traditionally) differentiated on the grounds of certain attributes which have decidedly low rates of variation within a sex. (Or: the genes considered "female" almost always result in an organ-level difference from those for "male".) In other words: the variation in height is not what maleness and femaleness are based on, and so variation within them doesn't matter. In contrast, the variation in certain traits (eg, skin color) are precisely what race is based upon, and so variation within one "race" being greater than between races makes it functionally meaningless.

This comment also happens to display how ignorant racialists are of basic statistics. The commenter here uses range as a measure of variation (and even then, only an approximate range using numbers taken out of the commenter's ass), when in fact variance and standard deviation are far more commonly used as reliable measures of variation.

Identification of race via genetics
Similar to creationist quote-mines of evolutionist literature, online racialists often do the same with Witherspoon et al. 2007:

The above paragraph is what they spam, especially the bold. What they don't post is the paragraph that immediately follows:

Two individuals from separate populations can then be genetically more similar than two individuals from the same population (with >10,000 SNP's). In other words: even with an incredibly stringent set of criteria (think about the last time you sat down and listed out 10,000 genetic reasons that someone was a member of their race), race still isn't a binary, but a gradient. Moreover, at the point where you are using >10,000 polymorphisms, races like "white" and "black" have utterly ceased to exist and are replaced with innumerable smaller groups.

Claims of bias in anthropology
The rejection of the race concept […] in the 1960s was based on the genetic evidence reviewed earlier. Conformity to political correctness was not the cause of these changes[.]

The repeated assertions that the negative reception of research asserting average Black inferiority is due to total ideological control over the academy by “environmentalists,” leftists, Marxists, or “thugs” are unwarranted character assassinations on those engaged in legitimate and valuable scholarly criticism.

What now?
Race as biology is fiction, racism as a social problem is real Race isn't biologically useful. But it still carries substantial social importance that we can't just wish away. For now, the best option may be to educate people about the insignificance of race and (as racial parity is achieved) hope race fades from social significance. As Cartmill 1998 writes:

Notable racialists

 * Benjamin Rush: Rush was, rather interestingly, one of the Founding Fathers and an abolitionist. He believed that blacks suffered from a disease called "negritude," supposedly a form of leprosy, that could be "cured" and would result in turning their skin white. This led to his attempts to develop quack "cures" for "negritude."


 * Expanding on Rush's work, Cartwright argued that drapetomania also a physical illness that could be diagnosed through the appearance of lesions on the skin. No doubt this had nothing to do with the backbreaking manual labor and frequent whippings and beatings slaves endured. Cartwright coined two pseudo-psychological diagnoses that rationalized and justified slavery. The first he called "drapetomania," which was allegedly an illness causing slaves to run away from their masters. Conveniently for the slave masters, much of the "treatment" for this "illness" consisted of whipping. The second "diagnosis" was "dysaethesia aethiopica", or laziness.


 * J. Philippe Rushton: Advocate of "Life History Theory" that proposes that all socially desirable personality and intellectual traits are concentrated in the white and Asian races, whereas all the antisocial and undesirable traits are concentrated in black people. Repeatedly criticised in academia for sloppy scholarship including using questionable sources of information including the Penthouse Forum.


 * Richard Lynn: Eugenics advocate who recently wrote a paper claiming that black people have longer penises than whites, who in turn are better endowed than Asians. This was based on Rushton's "Goldilocks" theory of race: "Orientals have big brains but small genitalia, Africans have small brains but big genitalia, but Europeans Are Just Right." One of the key sources of data used in this paper was the World Penis Size Site, an anonymously compiled source that includes a lot of made-up data and bogus references. Lynn has also stated that "incompetent cultures" need "phasing out." Just to clear up any doubt about which cultures he thinks need "phasing out" he writes: "Who can doubt that the Caucasoids and the Mongoloids are the only two races that have made any significant contributions to civilization?"


 * Donald Templer: Authored a book on penises used as an additional reference by Richard Lynn even though Templer has no qualifications in urology. Advocates the voluntary sterilization of welfare recipients on eugenics grounds.


 * American racist, eugenicist, anti-immigration campaigner and conspiracy theorist, author of many books including The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy. He was enormously influential in early 20th century America, and is satirised by F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby, but a lengthy and enthusiastic visit to Nazi Germany in 1939-40 caused his reputation to fall after America entered World War II.


 * Varg Vikernes: Norwegian musician, arsonist, murderer, gun lover, authoritarian wingnut, Neopagan, Neo-Nazi, White nationalist, anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist, anti-vaxxer, prepper and former YouTube personality, banned recently from the platform.


 * David Duke: former Grand Wizard (what?) of the Ku Klux Klan (yes, really).
 * Stefan Molyneux: former YouTube personality, banned recently from the platform
 * Jared Taylor: editor of American Renaissance, a magazine for white nationalism that he founded
 * Richard Spencer
 * Sargon of Akkad
 * Nazis
 * Metapedia
 * Human Phenotypes
 * Human Varieties