Except constructing basketball teams. 
But that is ridiculous. People do not have genetic probabilities. They have actual, definite genes.
Sometimes doctors attempt to determine who has sickle cell by looking them. It’s a mistake. Sickle cell deriving from the same genetic mutation which causes it among Africans, in found in southern Italy and Sicily. Doctors who assume that it’s a “black” disease will make errors.
If you were constructing a basketball team, and had access to one piece of information about candidates, would race be the thing you’d ask about?
Clearly you’d want to have people from the “tall race”.
I think it’s sad that some people let a small group of idiots dictate how they think about science. Of course people can be grouped into classifications called “races.” And of course that doesn’t mean that people of one race are inherently and irredeemably inferior to people of any other race.
But some people are so pissed off at the racists that they have decided to fight against the concept of “race” itself. Why can’t you just fight against the racists? Also, why do you think that fighting against the concept of race itself will have any impact on racists?
The OP asks about “biological” races. And unless you are calling most biologists “idiots”, it would seem to me that you’d want to know what actual biologists think about their subject. And the vast consensus is that biological races do not exist.
You can go ahead and classify people any way you want. But you can’t do it in a biologically objective way. You might as well talk about tall races or short races, hairy races or not-so-hairy races. But there isn’t any one scientifically objective way to divide populations up biologically.
We are one large interbreeding population with genes flowing in and out of any subgroup you can imagine.
I told Rand Rover on the pit that the problem is not the science, not even the controversial one that is investigating what the differences could be. The problem is that the racists are twisting science to make it support reprehensible ideas.
I have found that to fight racists you do not even have to call them that, the most damming fact against them is that they clearly fail spectacularly at following the progress of science, twist the most recent research and get stuck in the [del]1850’s[/del] 1950’s.
You could look at them. Congolese and Ethiopian people look very different from each other.
Humanity can be reliably classified into any number of categories. The part where all the subjectivity comes into play is in deciding where to draw the lines and how many races there are going to be in your system. Some divisions do seem to make more sense than others, like between East and West Africa for example.
The problem is that for whatever scheme you come up with, the one with more divisions is always going to “make more sense”. You come up with N races, and my scheme with N + 1 is going to “make more sense”.
There is no divisional system based on definitive biology which corresponds to anyone’s idea of what the “races” should be, though–no fact-based approach which can meet racists’ needs. No matter which genes or combinations of genes you choose, you always end up grouping some people who are “obviously” different by other measures, and separating people who are phenotypically similar.
South Asia is littered with populations whom most European would instantly say were Black (as in African Black). And they really do look it. But then you analyze their DNA, and it turns out they are the populations outside Africa which are the most genetically distant from Africans.
And even these populations, with the possible exception of Andaman Islanders, are constantly losing their own genetic identity as they interbreed with other populations.
Well then how do you explain this:
Oh, and John Mace’s point is also correct. If we try to avoid the grouping-of-differences that I mentioned, we begin a spiral into ever-finer parsings of the genome. The whole idea rapidly becomes ridiculous.
Uh… you realize that your cite is lamenting that misunderstanding, ascribing it to failures of college science education?
By looking at their conclusion:
So thank you for demonstrating what I mentioned before, the conclusions of researchers involved in controversial research do not match the conclusions or solutions proposed by crackpots. People, and even scientists that propose keeping racial divisions in science, are not doing it right.
Also, that item is apparently based on a survey from some time prior to March 1992. Not only has the education presumably continued since then, taking into account recommendations like those noted… the relevant research fields themselves have been racing along too.
What I mean is that statistically there are some places where it makes more sense to make divisions than others. You can always continue to subdivide but if you are going to have very many different groupings some of them will start to in some way mirror the patterns of limited isolation and hybridization that result from our migration histories: New World/Old World, Eurasian/West/East (South?) African/Eurasian/Melanesian/Australian. I am not claiming that there is one definitive answer as to which of these or other sub divisions schemes is a more useful or isomorphic conceptual crutch, just that if you are dividing humanity into more and more subdivisions that the boundaries defining the “races” above will be drawn before ones that bisect more inbred populations.
If you are only going to have three races two of them are not going to be North and South Navajos or East and West Irish.
You are such a [del]racist[/del] racer! 
I have no idea what point you’re making. Plenty of real honest science is filled with probabilities and predictions with confidence intervals and so forth.
Yes, and I really shouldn’t have said “biologists”, since that field is very broad. If you look at physical anthropologists or geneticists, you’re going to see a much stronger rejection of the notion of biological races. Now, it is very common for those scientists to talk about “populations” when looking at genetic variations among humans. However, those “populations” can vary in size and geographical distribution depending on the context of the discussion.