/sci/ - Science & Math

>Is race meaningless?
Oh Jesus.
Since most human populations were seperated by different geographic barriers, humans have different genetic composition mainly due to genetic drift and somewhat due to different environments and therefore have different characteristics. Those chracatistics tend to cluster and are not usually smooth transition between populations. The clustering can be on any conceivable level, ie humans from that family have all that weird looking ear, that village has a lot of redheads, people from that island have a thousandfold higher incidence of genetic disease X, people from that continent have significantly darker skin. Those clusterings can be usally easily found with sufficiently deep genetic analysis. Having your complet DNA (and a huge database of other DNA from all over the planet) it can usually be determined what continent, country and sometimes even village you are from with reasonable accuracy.
Clustering on the scale of continents and subcontinents are usually especially pronounced, since those population are seperated by large natural barriers (oceans, large mountains, etc), and have been seperated with minimal genetic exchange for long times.
That clustering of human genetics on the scale of continents is sometimes called "race". The old racist definition of races were sometimes reasonable (since some difference in human physiology are easy to spot), but most often not. For example, some tribes in Africa are genetically much more different from the rest of Africa than the rest of Africa is from Euopeans.
Since racists were horrible poeple and humans are bad at logic and so conculde that anything racists believed in is bad and therefore wrong some huge idiots like to argue that the concept of race is meangingless, sometimes by arguing against strawman definitions of race, sometimes by using various stupid arguments, like that since it's not a perfect binary category (like anything in the social sciences ever is) it has no meaning.