(From Wikipedia)

"At the beginning of the 20th century, anthropologists questioned, and subsequently abandoned, the claim that biologically distinct races are (related to) distinct linguistic, cultural, and social groups. Then, the rise of population genetics led some mainstream evolutionary scientists in anthropology and biology to question the very validity of race as scientific concept describing an objectively real phenomenon.

One of the crucial innovations in reconceptualizing genotypic and phenotypic variation was anthropologist C. Loring Brace's observation that such variations, insofar as they are affected by natural selection, migration, or genetic drift, are distributed along geographic gradations called "clines" (Brace 1964). This point called attention to a problem common to phenotypic-based descriptions of races (for example, those based on hair texture and skin color): they ignore a host of other similarities and difference (for example, blood type) that do not correlate highly with the markers for race.

Finally, geneticist Richard Lewontin, observing that 85 percent of human variation occurs within populations, and not between populations, argued that neither "race" nor "subspecies" was an appropriate or useful way to describe populations (Lewontin 1973). This view is described by its opponents as Lewontin's Fallacy. Some researchers report the variation between racial groups (measured by Sewall Wright's population structure statistic Fst) accounts for as little as 5% of human genetic variation. However, because of technical limitations of Fst, many geneticists now believe that low Fst values do not invalidate the suggestion that there might be different human races (Edwards, 2003).

Meanwhile, neo-Marxists such as David Harvey (1982, 1984, 1992) believe that race is a social construct that in reality does not exist, used instead to extenuate class differences. (Hells yeah!)

These empirical challenges to the concept of race forced evolutionary sciences to reconsider their definition of race. Mid-century, anthropologist William Boyd defined race as:

A population which differs significantly from other populations in regard to the frequency of one or more of the genes it possesses. It is an arbitrary matter which, and how many, gene loci we choose to consider as a significant "constellation" (Boyd 1950).

Lieberman and Jackson (1994) have pointed out that "the weakness of this statement is that if one gene can distinguish races then the number of races is as numerous as the number of human couples reproducing."

Alongside empirical and conceptual problems with "race" following the Second World War, evolutionary and social scientists were acutely aware of how beliefs about race had been used to justify discrimination, apartheid, slavery, and genocide. This questioning gained momentum in the 1960s during the American Civil Rights Movement and the emergence of numerous anti-colonial movements worldwide."

Is it really worth it?