Biology discredits race

Taylor says that there are three basic problems in classical race-thinking that persuaded biology to take a non-racialist approach to studying human variation:

1. Its typological basis: skin color appears as a continuum rather than in a discretized manner. The categories that might be formed from the discretization would only be arbitrary, unnatural ones.
2. Illusory consistency: The "essential" traits that supposedly define each grouping often fail to appear as clusters that are reliable. The unreliable "essential" traits can extend as far as intelligence and behavior, clearly unscientific generalizations.
3. Archaic conception of inheritance: Race-thinking in the biological sciences oversimplifies inheritance. It is immaturely descriptive rather than explanatory.

I don't know if you'd heard about this but about a year ago, James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA basically stated that people of African descent were mentally inferior. Here's the link.

It seems to me that with the discovery of DNA, scientists would appreciate just how complicated inheritance can be. This assimilates pretty well into Taylor's quoting of John H. Relethford: "Until the 1950's much of biological anthropology was devoted to racial description and classification...followed later by an explanatory phase."

On the other hand, there are many companies these days that can take a saliva sample and tell you your constitutive races down to percentages. They recently published a genetic map of Europe. Its very interesting science and steers clear of the problematic clustering of skin color with other traits.

From an empirical standpoint, breaking DNA down into race seems a purely scientific pursuit that avoids the problems of race-thinking. However, I contend that it allows for a resurgence of classical race-thinking into biology, in its potential to link other genes (ie. gay genes, dumb genes) to the ones that "dictate" one's exact race. It seems even Nobel Prize winners can fall into this trap. This suggests that condition number two is still a problem to contend with in biology.