I too am disappointed by Saletan’s article but I am heartened by all the excellent posts debunking his views.

The only thing I might add is that Mr. Saletan (many of whose other articles I did like very much) has a problem with classification. Race comes to us as a socially and violently constructed identity, so that it becomes an existential, a lived reality. But it is not a biological one.

The fact that certain genetic traits correspond to specific reactions to medical treatment shows that the classification should be based on those traits rather than on the previously socially imagined ones. If some researchers interpret their results on the basis of race this only shows that they are still prisoners of the racialized social perception they were brought up with. For instance, people with smaller eyes have a greater tendency to suffer from narrow angle glaucoma, but does this make them a race? Of course not because they have not been socially defined as a "race."

In the US we still have the legacy of the "one drop rule" enforced during slavery and segregation times. One drop of an imaginary black blood made you a member of the black "race." This seems to me to have remained a given, or to borrow the sociologist Weber’s expression, an invisible iron cage, distorting Saletan’s and others perception of "race," genetics and medicine.

Good lord! You act as if Mr. Saletan is arguing for eugenics and craniometry. It's not racist if you say that people of African heritage tend to get sickle cell anemia more than other people. Guess what, black people have similar genes. A person from Sweden has different genes than a person from Japan. Do you know how you can tell? They look different, but you can also look at there genomes. It's a crude method and it's a method that people are unduly sensitive to, but you can make some generalizations about people based on their ethnicity and have a good idea how they will respond to some drugs. It has nothing to do with the "one drop rule". No one is saying black people are bad, because there is a specific drug that can alleviate heart disease for them.

kati, does it make you feel better if we say "peoples isolated by the ocean" instead of race? Its hard for people today to understand, but for thousands, maybe millions of years, The people of Europe, America, Africa, and Asia were separated by the ocean. They did not have airplanes, or even boats that could travel that far for a long long time. These peole certainly did not breed with eachother. This is seen in the animal kingdom all the time, for example in Africa it is suspected that several type of Monkeys were eventually seperated by mountains and became seperate species over time, there was a news story in yahoo about fish who look exactly the same but are now considered a different species. Everyone points out that .1% is the only difference between the races, well the problem is only something like 1% seperates us from the closest animals in the animal kingdom, one chromosome can cause severe problems in a person. Small differences can mean big changes. For the sake of race however, it becomes clear that we are very very similar, and are clearly all humans, with the same intelligence, and basic abilities, but that doesn't mean that race, or if you prefer, differences based on the location of your ancestors on the map, don't exist.

"If some researchers interpret their results on the basis of race"

Or because the results fall along those lines? People separated by location were exposed to different environmental pressures & developed some distinct genetic traits. Do you not believe that?

Yes Ben, I do agree with you. But the people living in the US who are usually defined as different "races" have been mating voluntarily or involuntarily across categories for centuries in addition to sharing the same locales. I find it problematic to use the social concept of race (for instance the "one drop rule" defining a person as African American but not as European American) in a rigorous genetic study.

The nineteenth century concept of race might seem to work for a while in genetic studies of medicine, but these might be masking environmental factors.

It might be relevant here to think of Galileo as an example. Apparently, his difficulties with the Church when he stated that the earth is a sphere and is rotating around the earth were compounded by scientific problems. The old model of flat earth at the center of the universe included data on the movements of the sun and the stars that had been collected over the centuries and were apparently more predictive than Galileo was able to produce at the time. This shows that it is possible to use an old erroneous model to garner some useful data, but these in turn should lead to a new model. (in this regard and if you haven't read it yet, I would highly recommend a fascinating and widely influential book by Thomas Kuhn which itself broke new ground in the history of science, THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS...)