So, we're finding out what we have always known, namely, that "race" is primariy a social overlay upon a set of irrelvant physical characteristics. Wow. Tomorrow's headline: Sky Is Primarily Blue, And Grass Green.

Not to say that race doesn't exist. It exists as long as people think on it and act on it. They are, however, thinking and acting on their own ideas, nothing real, nothing outside their own minds.

Why, then, race's stability? Politics, and power. People bring up race when they mean to accomplish something by it--to expand freedom or abolish it; to make, or unmake, or ruin an underclass; to project our hopes, or fears, or lies about ourselves onto someone else.

Hence my steady bemusement with Saletan's wrestling with science and race. Even someone marginally scientifically literate, and certainly someone as informed as Saletan, knows that race is not a scientific concept. The fact that it's subject to arbitrary assignment--better still, self-assignment--should be a hint. At best, race is used as a messy proxy for some real underlying physiological trait. At worst, race is a neat, clean proxy for the bias of the researcher.

Scientists decline to discuss race not because it's not PC, but because it's not science but something else--possibly sloppy, possbly evil, certainly not worth a scientist's time and trouble.