Race does not exist-fair and balanced! One of the posters on the comment boards linked to this article from Fox News explaining how race has been disproved. Here are some gems:

"Possibly only six genes determine the color of a person’s skin," Graves, a professor of evolutionary biology and African-American Studies at Arizona University, said in the Times interview. Six genes, out of the 30,000 to 40,000 genes that make us human, determine race.

As Steve Sailer has pointed out before-race != skin color (!= equals "not equal"). Otherwise, light skinned Asians (Japanese) would be the same race as dark skinned whites (Greeks), and dark skinned Amerindians (Quechua) would be the same race as dark skinned Caucasoids (North Indians). Any moron that says race = skin color is basically an ugly American that looks at the idea through the narrow context of their own particular nation's history-where race does = skin color because there were only two major races (the natives had the grace to die off) that could be defined by their coloration. If race was just skin color, black people wouldn't talk about "good hair" and "knappy hair" or "good features". White kids wouldn't ignorantly ask to touch a black person's hair, because after all, the only difference between the two groups is their skin color, we all know that! And I wouldn't have people telling me that I'm just a "white person that's been burned dark by the sun" [1]. I feel stupid just typing this out, but I know many Americans who have this sort of simplistic view of the world. I don't know what's going to happen when the Latino population starts getting big enough that they demand that Americans differentiate between their subdivisions, Mestizo and Indian, and Americans start scratching their heads and wonder at how they could tell the difference between the brown folk since they all look the same. But enough of that, look at this moronic quote:

Graves and Venter hope their research will prevent doctors from considering race when making diagnoses. But, as the Times points out, old habits die hard. The current Surgeon General, Dr. David Satcher, continues to divert millions of dollars toward eliminating health disparities among the "races" by 2010. Black medical associations continue to fund research into black-only pharmaceuticals for "black-only" ailments.

Where does Venter get off making such an asinine comment? He's not part of a racial minority, so he doesn't have to stress out about organ shortages. Small-minded asshole. Satcher probably cares because he knows the downsides of assuming everyone is the same. If 70% of the population is white, and you assume that everyone is the same, can't we guess which group will be the basis of studies that lead to diagnoses? Remember, race doesn't exist, you can generalize from a large enough sample to the whole population. Yeah Venter, laugh your way to the bank while innocent minorities die of badly prescribed medicine because "race doesn't exist" so you have some political cover [2]. Well meaning liberals and conservatives need to stop peddling these shallow ideas. And come on, in your heart, you know they're wrong!. Godless adds: And in your head, you know they're wrong too. Need to get up that FAQ. Till then, here's more science on why race exists and has biological meaning. Razib's postscript: Here some stuff about the evolutionary biologist above from some minority organization. Also an excerpt:

In addition, he is interested in the history and philosophy of science as it relates to the biology of race and racism in western society. He belives that there are still significant academic and popular views of race that are mired in the biological determinism of the 19th century and the application of proper scientific method and philosophy, along with quantitative genetics reveals the underlying racist ideology of these programs.

He did do work in drosophila though, so he's got real creds in evolutionary biology-just not in human evolution. [1] As I explain to everyone, white people are just brown people that don't get enough sun. Though you might be curious to know that my mother is rather light-skinned for a South Asian, and when I was a kid I had a cool Sicilian barber and when my mom would wait in in the lobby for my hair to get cut sometimes one of his older clients would speak to her in Italian because they thought she might be one of his many female relatives. [2] OK, CELERA failed as a pure genomics play and now they're going into more traditional pharmaceuticals and Venter is gone. Good riddance.