Jeff Eddings

“One of the many pernicious aspects of this research was the way it was used to classify human “races.” In biology and anthropology, race has long been abandoned as a meaningful category; indeed, although the term has been in use since the seventeenth century, it has never been precisely defined. There has never been any agreement about the number of human races, or what the definitive characteristics of a race might be: skin color, hair type, head shape, etc. Genetic research in the twentieth century has shown that there are no genes that correspond to racial types and that the range of variation within so-called races is greater than the variation across them. But scientists in the early 1920s were working with an essentialist model of race as something immutable, definitive, and grounded in biological reality.”
― Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia