This article is rather disturbing in that it attempts to mix science with Political Correctness.
Define "Political Correctness" and point to the examples of it in the text. You made this claim, so the burden is on you to back it up. I do not accept the term "Political Correctness" as anything but a subjective, emotion-laden evaluation.
The article implies that our concepts of Race and Racial differences is strictly social and the genetic variations are "just not there."
Well, if You use this "scientific mindset," then there is no differences between species or even Fauna and Flora. Because after all, GENETICALLY, the variations are SO SMALL as to be INCONSEQUENTIAL
Like myself at first, you misread the meaning of the statement. "There are more similarities than differences" meaning, once you take out the genes that are common across all of homo sapiens sapiens, there is no scientific way to discern "race", because the visible traits we use to determine belonging to certain races appear so often across the species that it is impossible to define in a meaningful way.
People do frequently "wrongly" identify the race of others -- at least, according to the people who say they have been misidentified. My husband, for example, is Sicilian. If he grows a beard, he looks like, and has been mistaken for, an Arab. But his DNA does not show Semitic origin as a primary contributor. He also has North African and Italian/Greek DNA, and he can become quite dark in the sun. What is his race? In the USA, up until the 1950s he'd be considered "Black." Is he Black? He does not identify as Black. He checks the White/Caucasian box.
This was not discussed in the article, but "race" as a term has changed in meaning ever since it was invented. Not even American surveys can agree on what races there are. The term itself, whenever surveys ask this question, mixes together terms that are used to denote observable features as well as language families and continents. Black, White/Caucasian (not Hispanic), Hispanic, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American. This clearly makes no sense at all. Hispanic means "Spanish-speaking." What does one's language have to do with one's appearance, particularly since many "Hispanics" are actually of Indigenous South or Central American origin, whereas others are of more European origin. So "race" as a method of identifying people scientifically is not even something everyone agrees on, mixes together totally unrelated categories, and has never had a stable meaning.
Secondly many regions are completely ignored as separate even though there are clear differences in how they look. Why is "Asian" one race, when Chinese, Japanese and Koreans look VERY different from Central and South Asians, and Russians are primarily also in Asia. What race are they? Many South Asians share traits with people of African Descent, such as very dark skin and wiry hair. What race are people from India? What if they don't have dark skin and wiry hair? What race are people from the Middle East? What race are the Kurds, who are literally Caucasians, but also from the Middle East, and share some features with Semitic peoples, however some are blond with blue eyes?
Even today, there is no generally agreed-upon definitions of these races, let alone one based on measurable characteristics, so how can one measure the degree of belonging to a race? If you can't
measure it, it's not a science-based categorization.
The fact is that if we can DISCERN Phenotypical differences, that means that we can discriminate between one flower from another, one animal species from another and even discern male and female of various species. THAT IS SCIENCE.
You are in error. Human "discernment" of "Phenotypical" features is notoriously unreliable as a basis for scientific discrimination. One need only to look at the original categorizations of species by the early biologists. When we discovered DNA, we began to realize that categorization by feature was a bad way to determine how species were related. The correct, and only method of scientifically determining relationship, including belonging to a species or a variety, is through DNA typing. This is for exactly the reason that the author mentions: because many, many traits develop independently, in almost completely unrelated organisms, under similar environmental conditions. This has led many, many species to be recategorized, moved sometimes into a completely different genus, or eliminated as a separate species entirely.
I have demonstrated how race is in fact a completely unscientific method for categorizing people:
1. it mixes unrelated categories
2. it relies upon visual distinction by humans, which is cannot reliably determine relationship
3. There is no agreed-upon definition of
measurable characteristics.
4. It ignores DNA
5. It lumps together groups of people that are clearly visually distinct from each other, and leaves others out entirely
Clearly race is an unreliable, inconsistent, self-contradictory, qualitative and totally subjective categorization of humans. There is no other logical conclusion but that it is unscientific.
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