Race is obviously a thing. You can look at somebody and usually have a pretty good idea of whether their ancestors are from Africa, Europe, the Middle East, the Americas, Asia, etc. Heck, with some practice, you can often figure out which part of Europe, Africa, Asia, etc they are from (Koreans look different than Filipinos, Eastern Europeans look different than Scandinavians, etc). And such an identification will correspond to measurable genetic differences.

Of course, this is only a coarse grained thing and there are lots of cases where somebody’s ancestry is difficult to determine based on their outward appearance, especially in cases where someone has mixed ancestry. But what most people mean by race—that you can look at most people and make a decent guess about their ancestry—is a real thing which is born out by genetics.

You’re right up to the point where you say that what most people mean by race is a decent guess about people’s ancestry.

What do most people mean by race, then?

Race is just a very vague method of generalising large groups of humans, once that is shown to be decreasingly useful as we learn more accurate methods. As a result even the definition is vague.

These days race has mostly been reduced to vague groups of appearance; for medical/genetic groups we usually have better indicators. It is still useful as a vague appearance descriptor. We shouldn't claim that a visual description is racism, it is just a handy tool.

Race is so controversial a topic that I would argue virtually anything that makes it into print these days is heavily compromised.

I think a better title would have been “there’s no scientific basis for skin-color-based racial categories”. The article cites all kinds of people grouped by distinct genetic profiles.

Agreed, based on this skin color seems to be a red herring in talking about race in that it takes just one difference and magnifies when it's just one other difference of which there are many. Interesting to read about the degree of genetic diversity within Africans and the lack of it (relatively) among non Africans.

Indeed, I'd be interested to know the groups with least diversity also.

Police forensics labs beg to disagree: https://newatlas.com/3d-id-skull-forensic-software/22137/

Police forensics labs are about as scientific as psychics and phrneologists.

https://www.nature.com/news/faulty-forensic-science-under-fi...

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/forensic-tools-wh...

https://phys.org/news/2015-05-fbi-hair-analysis-problems-rev...

I don't know if their definition of race is different to most people's definition, but in medicine we often want to know someone's race since it has real implications for the types of diseases they're likely to have. Often culture and country play a big role, but the genetics also do.

Agree that there are very important genetic components to disease (it's what I study), but the article points out that the "races" we use now are pretty arbitrary and do a bad job categorizing people's generic makeup. For example, there is more genetic diversity in Africa than the rest of the world combined, yet we in the United States basically just would think of their race as "African," and this is not a very helpful description.

Even worse, I've noticed in USA you seem to classify "white" as a race, which is absurd.

Bone marrow transplants disagree

https://bethematch.org/transplant-basics/matching-patients-w...

You can't look at the clusters of IQ around the world and ignore a genetic component to intelligence either:

https://iq-research.info/en/average-iq-by-country