I know plenty of "white people who are good athletes and plenty of Black people who are not.

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Defining race
Further information: Race (classification of human beings)
[edit] Non-concordance

The most widely used human racial categories are based on various combinations of visible traits such as skin color, eye shape and hair texture. However, many of these traits are non-concordant in that they are not necessarily expressed together. For example skin color and hair texture vary independently.[2] This caused problems to early anthropologists who were attempting to classify race based on visible traits. Some examples of non-concordance include:

    * There are many people in Africa and all over the world affected by albinism who have very light skin.
    * Skin color varies all over the world in different populations. People from the Indian subcontinent are classified as Caucasian although most have dark skin.
    * Epicanthal fold are typically associated with East Asian populations but are found in populations all over the world, including many Native Americans, the Khoisan, the Saami, and even amongst some isolated groups such as the Andamanese.
    * Lighter hair colors are typically associated with Europeans, especially Northern Europeans, but blond hair is found amongst a limited, small number of the dark skinned populations of the south pacific, particularly the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu.

[edit] Genetic distance

The 0.1% genetic difference that differentiates any two random humans is still the subject of much debate. The discovery that only 8% of this difference separates the major races led some scientists to proclaim that race is biologically meaningless. They argue that since genetic distance increases in a continuous manner any threshold or definitions would be arbitrary. Any two neighboring villages or towns will show some genetic differentiation from each other and thus could be defined as a race. Thus any attempt to classify races would be imposing an artificial discontinuity on what is otherwise a naturally occurring continuous phenomenon.

However, other scientists disagree by claiming that the assertion that race is biologically meaningless is politically motivated and that genetic differences are significant. Neil Risch states that numerous studies over past decades have documented biological differences among the races with regard to susceptibility and natural history of a chronic disease. Effectively Neil Risch is attempting to redefine "race" for human populations to represent that small proportion of variation that is known to vary between continental populations. It is well established, that the level of differentiation between the continental human groups, as measured by the statistic FST is about 0.06-0.1 (6-10%), with about 5-10% of variation at the population level (that is between different populations occupying the same continent) and about 75-85% of variation within populations.(Risch et al., 2002; Templeton, 1998; Ossorio and Duster, 2005; Lewontin, 2005). Tempeton (1998) states that in biology a level of 0.25-0.3 (20-30%) of differentiation normally accepted in biological literature for a population to be considered a race or subspecies.

    "A standard criterion for a subspecies or race in the nonhuman literature under the traditional definition of a subspecies as a geographically circumbscribed, sharply differentiated population is to have FST values of at least 0.25 to 0.3 (Smith et al. 1997). Hence as judged by the criterion in the nonhuman literature, the human FST value is too small to have taxonomic significance under the traditional subspecies definition."(Templeton, 1998)

Indeed Neil Risch himself avoids defining race, when asked to respond to the comment "Genome variation research does not support the existence of human races." he replied

    What is your definition of races? If you define it a certain way, maybe that's a valid statement. There is obviously still disagreement....Scientists always disagree! A lot of the problem is terminology. I'm not even sure what race means, people use it in many different ways. He continues, "but that doesn't preclude you from using it or the fact that it has utility". (Gitschier, 2005)