Actually, it does have a scientific application. Tracking the flow of hereditary traits, especially such simple ones as control some factors of appearance, can tell an anthropologist a great deal about the flow of people. For example, the Negrito hunter-gatherers of China are very distinct from the majority Chinese population. However, they share many physical traits with the people of some Indonesian islands. This, along with linguistic information, can tell anthropologists not only where the Austronesian and Hanese racial groups moved, but when, and under what motivating force. This is not necessarily dividing into races, but it is a division based in large part on physical traits.