Return of the race myth?

As the 20th-century world recoiled from the horrors of Nazi Germany and the eugenics movement, we learned how economic, political and social circumstances produced the racial differences that science had once claimed to be "natural". Race came to be recognised as a social construct - an aspect of social choices rather than a reflection of biological differences between racial groups.

The constructionist thesis gained popularity after the second world war and encouraged advances in civil and human rights for racial minorities. And with the Human Genome Project finding in 2000 that all humans are more than 99 per cent alike, many thought genomics would put the final nail in the race coffin.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the funeral. Shortly after the HGP's finding, several research projects began focusing on mapping this less than 1 per cent of human genetic variation onto social categories of race.

This small variation reflects millions of SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms), some of which may loosely correlate with geography. Yet the resilience of linking such differences and disparities to biological mechanisms...