At the beginning of the 20th century, anthropologists questioned, and eventually abandoned, the claim that biologically distinct races are isomorphic with distinct linguistic, cultural, and social groups. Then, the rise of population genetics led some mainstream evolutionary scientists in anthropology and biology to question the very validity of race as scientific concept describing an objectively real phenomenon. Those who came to reject the validity of the concept, race, did so for four reasons: empirical, definitional, the availability of alternative concepts, and ethical (Lieberman and Byrne 1993).
The first to challenge the concept of race on empirical grounds were anthropologists Franz Boas, who demonstrated phenotypic plasticity due to environmental factors (Boas 1912), and Ashley Montagu (1941, 1942), who relied on evidence from genetics. Zoologists Edward O. Wilson and W. Brown then challenged the concept from the perspective of general animal systematics, and further rejected the claim that “races” were equivalent to “subspecies” (Wilson and Brown 1953).
One of the crucial innovations in reconceptualizing genotypic and phenotypic variation was anthropologist C. Loring Brace’s observation that such variations, insofar as it is affected by natural selection, migration, or genetic drift, are distributed along geographic gradations; these gradations are called “clines” (Brace 1964). This point called attention to a problem common to phenotypic-based descriptions of races (for example, those based on hair texture and skin color): they ignore a host of other similarities and difference (for example, blood type) that do not correlate highly with the markers for race. Thus, anthropologist Frank Livingstone’s conclusion that, since clines cross racial boundaries, “there are no races, only clines” (Livingstone 1962: 279). In 1964, biologists Paul Ehrlich and Holm pointed out cases where two or more clines are distributed discordantly—for example, melanin is distributed in a decreasing pattern from the equator north and south; frequencies for the haplotype for beta-S hemoglobin, on the other hand, radiate out of specific geographical points in Africa (Ehrlich and Holm 1964). As anthropologists Leonard Lieberman and Fatimah Linda Jackson observe, “Discordant patterns of heterogeneity falsify any description of a population as if it were genotypically or even phenotypically homogeneous” (Lieverman and Jackson 1995).
Finally, geneticist Richard Lewontin, observing that 85 percent of human variation occurs within populations, and not between populations, argued that neither “race” nor “subspecies” were appropriate or useful ways to describe populations (Lewontin 1973). Some researchers report the variation between racial groups (measured by Sewall Wright’s population structure statistic FST) accounts for as little as 5% of human genetic variation2.
A. W. F. Edwards claimed in 2003 that such conclusions are unwarranted because the argument ignores the fact that most of the information that distinguishes populations is hidden in the correlation structure of the data and not simply in the variation of the individual factors.[8] While it makes Lewontin’s argument unwarranted, Edward’s paper does not address the existence or absence of human race, see Lewontin’s Fallacy.
Also, it has been argued that the calculation of within group and between group diversity has violated certain assumptions regarding human genetic variation. Calculation of this variation is known as FST and Long and Kittles (2003) have questioned the validity of this reproducible statistic. The first problem is that effective population size is assumed to be equal in the calculation of FST, if population sizes vary, then allele relatedness among alleles will also vary. The second problem is that FST calculation has assumed that each population is evolutionarily independent. Calculation of FST can therefore only be made for the set of populations being observed, and generalisations from specific data sets cannot be applied to the species as a whole.[9]
Long and Kittles tested four models for determining FST and concluded that the model used most often for estimating this statistic is the simplest and worst fitting. Their best fit model was still a poor fit for the observed genetic variation, and calculation of FST for this model can only be made on a population by population basis. They conclude that African populations have the highest level of genetic diversity, with diversity much reduced in populations outside of Africa. They postulate that if an extra-terrestrial alien life form killed the entire human species, but kept a single population which it preserved, the choice of population to keep would greatly effect the level of diversity represented. If an African population were selected then no diversity would be lost, whereas nearly a third of genetic diversity would be lost if a Papuan New Guinea population were chosen. Indeed within population genetic diversity in African populations has been shown to be greater than between population genetic diversity for Asians and Europeans. They conclude that their findings are consistent with the American Association of Physical Anthropologists 1996 statement on race
I feel this is a futile conversation anyway. The OP obviously has no intention of coming back and clarifying his question, so it’s a moot point I suppose.