KnightersRevenge said:
This is a bit of a misnomer 'burger. There are some genuine genetic variations that do suggest it is more than a social simple construct. There are medical issues that are specific to 'groups' that are consistent with some definitions of 'race'. The idea of worth or value or superiority is nonsense but saying race is completely invalid doesn't hold. The link below gives some examples.
https://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/38950/title/On-Race-and-Medicine/
This article is similar to something I studied in uni. In fact I accidentally quoted it almost verbatim.
" This classification has become institutionalized with little awareness that the variable “race” is not actually a biological phenomenon: there is more genetic variation within these racial groups than across them. Rather, the notion of race is a social construct. "
And yes, it's true you can look at frequencies for certain alleles being similar in populations with a shared ancestry, that's true. Another non medical example is the presence of Neanderthal DNA in people of European descent but not in those of African descent, and Denisovan DNA in people of Melanesian and Aboriginal descent. But this doesn't provide a definition of Race. Because any accepted level of similarity is arbitrary. For instance, the alleles for diabetes are more prevalent in my family than in my wife's, but you wouldn't say we're a different race.
I read something recently about a whole bunch of white supremacists taking these ancestry kits, only to find out that they're '10 percent middle eastern' or whatever bogus conclusions those things come to. In reality, they just look at certain variations in someone's genome and line them up statistically with what variations are most common in certain places around the globe at the moment. Because it's impossible to pin down your genome as 'Australian' or even 'White Australian'.
Of course evolution necessitates that reproductively isolated populations diverge in terms of allele frequencies, but that does not in anyway follow societally placed country borders or classical notions of Race.