Partitioning of genetic variation in human populations and the concept of race

In this chapter we have two major purposes in mind. Firstly, we review data on the distribution of human genetic variation, to address the question of the existence of races as valid biological entities for our species. Following this review, we focus on the concept of races as it is frequently used in biomedical and epidemiological work. Human races. Introducing geographic variation in his classical text Systematics and the Origin of Species, Ernst Mayr (1947) makes a distinction between species in which biological changes from population to population are continuous, and species in which groups of populations with different character combinations are separated by borders. In the latter, the entities separated by borders are subspecies or geographic races. Similarly, in some human genetic textbooks (see for example Vogel and Motulsky, 1986) races are envisaged as large populations of individuals who have a significant fraction of their genes in common, and can be distinguished from ot...