BY RAZIB KHAN AND BRIAN B. BOUTWELL

WE SEEK TO ADDRESS A SINGULAR, SIMPLE QUESTION: are racial classifications (Black, White, Hispanic, etc.) a pure social construction, or are they “real” on some deeper biological level? Scientific advances continue to converge on a single, clear, conclusion: Race is a useful social construction that maps on to a biological reality.1

Our everyday understandings about race generally have to do with physical appearance.2 The reason why is obvious—it’s what we can see. But obviously that is a coarse, less trustworthy measure. The indigenous people of the New World, for instance, had brown skins and straight black hair; so early Europeans labeled them “Indians.”1 The only people known by Europeans to have brown skin and straight black hair in the Old World were Indians (as in residents of the Indian subcontinent). But the history of these two populations is very different; they just happen to have some physical characteristics in common.

Today, rather than looking at physical characteristics to obtain a systematic understanding of human variation, we look at DNA. DNA is the critical blueprint to generate all the functionality of your body. But within the billions of base pairs are telltale variations that reflect the deep history of your lineage, collapsing your pedigree back to your earliest human ancestors. Though my (Razib) son has brown hair, hazel eyes, and fair skin with just a faint touch of olive, one one look at his DNA could tell you that half his ancestry is South Asian.3 Looks can be deceiving.1 Incidentally, when you ask someone to report their own race/ethnic affiliation, it tends to to align quite well with what their DNA says about them.4 Our eyes can deceive us, but DNA does not lie.