j.r. leonard

I read this the first time you published it and had a discussion later with your brother about it. When you talk about 'race' you aren't actually referring to the racial definitions that are commonly used, are you?

Depends. Asian, Black, and White are commonly used categories.

so you think they are useful terms?

I do, yes. 1) people self identify using these categories and 2) they correspond to populations with slightly different evolutionary histories and ancestry (which is picked up in cluster analysis) Of course this is not to say that the categories cannot be further subdivided.

there is a 'white' race is there?

Roughly speaking it makes sense to use the term. Though in cluster analysis at K = 5 it’s Europe + Middle East + Central and South Asia. No doubt racial terms are a combination of lineage-based and socially-constructed categories.