Given that who counts as "white" or of any racial category has changed as a function of historical and cultural forces, rather than biological ones, race simply does not stand for anything in biology.

Then why do some biologists continue to insist on race as a valid category? Here are a few explanations:

• Political motivation: so-called scientists like Rushton and Charles Murray find race as a useful heuristic device to explain differences based on historically entrenched social inequalities as biological ones. That their "research" is patronized by eugenics-advocate organization The Pioneer Fund should be enough indication...
• Technophilia: many biologists who insist on the existence of race point to genomic mapping that supposedly demonstrates at a molecular level fundamental differences between human groups. The problem with this reliance on new technologies to "prove" old theories is this: if you ask a computer to search for differences between any two groups of individuals, however arbitrarily divided, the computer will "find" those differences et voila: 2 races! As Picasso once remarked: "Computers are useless; they can only give you answers." Flawed questions make for flawed answers.
• Historical ignorance: genomic investigations into race presuppose that human populations have been historically fixed in discretet, isolated genetic pools, which lends itself to the idea of races as discrete entities. This assumption writes out the long history of migration (and thus genetic flow) that defines human history. In a more recent historical lens, this faulty view treats unproblematically the fact that certain ethnic groups have become reclassified as under different racial categories. These were always socio-political shifts, not sudden genetic mutations. Case in point: Irish, Italians, and Jews were classified as black until the early 20th century.

I usually enjoy Mr. Saletan's writings on biology in the 21st century, but he should familiarize himself with the broader social scientific literature on race. It is simply embarrassing for Slate editors to allow statements like "Biologically, race is real" to be published, especially as the unjustified basis for an uncritical view of a seriously misunderstood phenomenon like race-tailored pharmaceuticals.

I'm severely disappointed in Mr. Saletan, who shows such wit and conscientiousness in his critiques of abortion debates, animal rights, and the politics of food, to see him subscribe to such scientistic senselessness.

I agree with your entire post, and only want to point out that there are virtually no biologists (or other scientists) continue to insist on race as a valid category.

Rushton is not a biologist; he is a psychologist. He is a fringe lunatic, and one of maybe 5 credentialed academics in the world who make these arguments. Watson, for all his expertise in foundational genetics, sadly falls into this tiny group.

Taken together, Rushton, Watson, and the non-scientist Saletan are much like the Behe/Dembski combination for intelligent design.

It is safe to say that biologists, scientists and academics who think that race is a valid biological category number no more than a handful out of millions.

Given this fact, why does Slate continue to underwrite this madness?

Crisker: "I agree with your entire post, and only want to point out that there are virtually no biologists (or other scientists) continue to insist on race as a valid category."

Now that's just a lie, Crisker. You know that. We both know that there are tons of research and science that "treat race as a valid category". For example, forensics, demographics, epidemiology, cultural anthropology, psychology, medicine, and countless other scientific subjects. They all use race as a category in innumerable research papers and research projects. It IS valid and people DO keep track of it. Our daily papers are full of articles that talk about racism, that talk about research regarding "black" versus "white" murder rates, child mortality rates, poverty, wealth, homeownership, mortgage defaults, voting, crime, and countless other subjects.

Hell, black folks INSIST that the police treat race as a "valid category" when they insist that the police gather data on the "race" of the folks that they arrest. Like the police can tell who has "one drop" when they stop some car for speeding. Feh. Black folks have special race-certifying agencies that go around and check the racial pedigree of businesspeople who apply for special race-based affirmative action. How could they do that if "race" was not a "valid category"?

Son, if "race" is not a "valid category" what the h*ll are these black people and scientists up to and why in God's name do we tolerate it!!I swear, you must really take us for morons. I just don't get how you and the other pseudo-scientists writing comments on this website can say race is not a "valid category" for science or life. Do you really think that none of us read any research or newspapers? That we are blind? That we just flew in from Mars?

Thanks for making my point, again. From the perspective of biology, genetics, and physical anthropology, race is not a valid category and it does not correspond to anything meaningful in a phenotypic sense.

Demographers and other socially based researchers may still use the term "race," but they recognize it as an historical, social, and political construction -- it simply is not a part of hard science.

The remainder of your post amply illustrates why we need to junk this term. This idea goes all the way back to 1795, when a German theorist sorted "races" according to 5 meaningless categories of skin color.

Aside from the fact that if we really want to sort and label by skin pigmentation, we will need thousands of different colors to capture all the variation, isn't it time we stopped using such a patently ridiculous term?

"It is safe to say that biologists, scientists and academics who think that race is a valid biological category number no more than a handful out of millions.

Given this fact, why does Slate continue to underwrite this madness?"

Because Slate's editors are asleep on the job, or they understand scientific writing less than Saletan does.

Since his first series on race and intelligence, I've disregarded this column as having anything technically correct to offer. They're filled with errors.

Come to think of it, you're right -- I don't know why I ever imagined that people of similar racial background are more biologically related than people of different racial backgrounds. Such pseudo-science! Those studies in which drugs tend to work differently depending on your race or ethnicity? Ignore them.

Or you could look for a way to reconcile collective with individual truths, instead of pretending one of them doesn't exist.

You can argue that race has taken on a whole new meaning in society, but that doesn't mean that race does not exist in some ways. I mean, call it what you want, you can change it to a different word so it isn't so offensive but their are differences.

Again, Mr. Saletan, it is pseudo-science. It is a category mistake. Those studies in which drugs work differently depending on race and ethnicity?

Look, let's make an analogy: You are giving a lecture in which the audience is divided down the middle by an aisle. You decide that there are fundamental, inherent differences between those sitting on the left of the aisle and those on the right. How could you prove such a thing?

You could convince yourself that the Left people have genetic commonalities that the Right people don't. But you want material evidence, like a good scientist should. So you take blood samples from everyone, and run the DNA of this population through an analysis.

"Tell me, oh great computer, did you find any differences between the left and right crowd?"

"Yes, oh great scientist, I found mutually exclusive differences between them."

"Aha! So the Left and the Right folks are different races!"

The problem with this whole "test" is that the genetic analysis will always find differences between any two or more individuals or any two or more groups.

The difference in the "real world" is that we put the light-skinned people on one side of the room and the dark-skinned people on the other, then go look for their "inherent" biological differences.

The bottom line is that, and good biologists will tell you, there is more genetic variation within any so-called racial group than between them. Thus, the category of race makes absolutely no statistical or ontological sense.

Those who tell you otherwise have proceeded from a false presupposition--the a priori existence of racial difference--and committed the error in the analogy.

Now, then what is race, as one responder above asked? Yes, it does exist, but not as biology. Race is a social construction. It is determined by cultural and historical factors. Racism is real, but it is based on attempts to legitimize the political subjugation of social groups, not on supposed biological differences.

"The bottom line is that, and good biologists will tell you, there is more genetic variation within any so-called racial group than between them. Thus, the category of race makes absolutely no statistical or ontological sense."

Isn't this the Lewontin fallacy? Check out Jon Entine's article on race in the context of sport & medicine. Also see 'Survival of the Sickest' by Dr Sharon Moalem <link>

"1. Humans are 99.9 percent the same. Therefore, race is "biologically meaningless."

This statement finds its origins in the research of Harvard University geneticist Richard Lewontin during the 1960s. "Human racial classification is of no social value and is positively destructive of social and human relations," Lewontin concluded in The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change in 1974. "Since such racial classification is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance either, no justification can be offered for its continuance."

Coming from a geneticist, Lewontin’s views had enormous influence and he was making a valid argument at the time. As Laval University anthropologist Peter Frost points out, Lewontin was referring to classic genetic markers such as blood types, serum proteins, and enzymes, which do show much more variability within races than between them. But his comments are widely misinterpreted even today to extend beyond that limited conclusion. Further research has shown this pattern of variability cannot reliably be extrapolated to all traits with higher adaptive value.

The 99.9 percent figure is based on DNA sequences that do not differ much between people or even between most mammals. As Jared Diamond, UCLA physiologist has noted, if an alien were to arrive on our planet and analyze our DNA, humans would appear as a third race of chimpanzees, who share 98.4 percent of our DNA. Just 50 out of the 32,00 genes that humans and chimps are thought to possess, or approximately 0.15 percent, may account for all of the cognitive differences between man and ape.

The impact of minute genetic differences is magnified in more sophisticated species.

....

large-scale study of the variability in the human genome by Genaissance Pharmaceuticals, a biotechnology company in Connecticut, has convincingly shown the fallaciousness of arguments tied to the 99.9 percent figure. The research shows that while humans have only 32,000 genes, there are between 400,000 and 500,000 gene versions. More specifically, they found that different versions of a gene are more common in a group of people from one geographical region, compared with people from another.

The implications are far reaching. By grouping individuals by the presence and variety of gene types, physicians may someday be able to offer treatments based on race or ethnic groups that will have been predetermined to work on a genetic level. Kenneth Kidd, a population geneticist at Yale University who is not connected to the study, said it confirmed the conclusions of those who have maintained that there is in fact considerable variability in the human population. He also chided the government and some genetic researchers for having stripped ethnic identities from the panel of people whose genomes have been searched for gene sequences."

"The bottom line is that, and good biologists will tell you, there is more genetic variation within any so-called racial group than between them. Thus, the category of race makes absolutely no statistical or ontological sense."

Sorry, the relevant excerpt I meant to copy is as follows:

"2. The genetic variation among European, African and Asian populations is minuscule compared to differences between individuals within those populations.

This factoid, which is a variation on the first myth, has been elevated to the level of revealed truth. According to Lewontin, "based on randomly chosen genetic differences, human races and populations are remarkably similar to each other, with the largest part by far of human variation being accounted for by the differences between individuals."

What does that mean? Not much by today’s nuanced understanding of genetics, it turns out. Consider the cichlid fish found in Africa’s Lake Nyas. The chiclid, which has differentiated from one species to hundreds over a mere 11,500 years, "differ among themselves as much as do tigers and cows," noted Diamond. "Some graze on algae, others catch other fish, and still others variously crush snails, feed on plankton, catch insects, nibble the scales off other fish, or specialize in grabbing fish embryos from brooding mother fish." The kicker: these variations are the result of infinitesimal genetic differences–about 0.4 percent of their DNA studied."

<link>

Hardboiledjuice has nailed the issue here. Thank you.

In Saletan's brief comment in this thread, he twice uses the phrase "racial background" as if the category has already been established, and that it has some biological or genetic significance. He starts with a false and unproved proposition and proceeds from there. Not only is this a category mistake, it's also bad logic.

there is more genetic variation within any so-called racial group than between them

CAN SOMEONE TELL ME WHY THIS IS SIGNIFICANT? No one is saying that there are different subspecies of humans.

Genetic variablity is not significant. Humans have a lot of genes and most of them are completely insignificant. You can some arbitrary "marker" gene and say "Ah ha, look, you can't predict who is going to have Gene X" Who cares?

Gene frequency is what is important. Within racial groups, believe it or not, there are genes that are likely to show up. Therefore, we can make some basic assumptions about the genetics of a population. This is not a perfect scenario! Ideally we would like to know the sequence of each individual's genome. In the meantime, it is foolish to ignore the patterns we see within different races.

If genetic differences within populations are so vast and important that we can't make assumptions about proclivity to disease or reaction to medication, consider this:

I have 100 million Hydroxyurea pills that I want to give away. These pills are used to treat sickle cell anemia. Should I just spread them out evenly around the world, because theoretically, anyone could develop the condition? OR Should I send most if not all to Africa?

OK Jonathan, let's take your hypothetical case of pharmaceutical humanitarianism:

If you did even a little research on the history of the genetic roots of sickle-cell anemia, you'd find that that it developed from a mutation thousands of years ago in people who lived not only in sub-Saharan Africa, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent. The development of the disease is historically linked to a gene that helped people survive mosquito-born malaria in those regions.

So you tell me how administering those Hydroxyurea pills to people based on perceived racial type is at all accurate. In this case anemia is genetic, but is not isomorphic with the boundaries of any racial group.

And as one goes through all the diseases and traits that are thought to be "race-based" one finds that the populations they pertain to do not conform to our categories of race. That is because these categories are socially constructed.