Race and Genetics

The relationship between race and genetics has relevance for the ongoing controversies regarding race.

Ongoing genetic research has investigated how ancestral human populations migrated in the ancestral geographic environment into different geographic areas. Today it is possible to determine, by genetic analysis, the geographic ancestry of a person and the degree of ancestry from each region. Such analyses can pinpoint the migrational history of a person's ancestors with a high degree of accuracy. Often, due to practices of group endogamy, allele frequencies cluster locally around kin groups and lineages, or by national, cultural or linguistic boundaries - giving a detailed degree of correlation between genetic clusters and population groups when considering many alleles simultaneously.

However, biological variation of any single human genetic trait is often described best as clinal, with gradual transitions of trait frequencies between different population clusters. Furthermore, different clines don't align around the same centers, constructing a much more complex picture of variation than merely large continental groupings.

Recent discoveries in genetics offer a means of categorizing race which is distinct from past methods, which were often based on very broad criteria corresponding to phenotypical characteristics, such as skin color, and which do not correlate reliably with geographic ancestry. Some anthropologists, particularly those working with forensics, consider race to be a useful biological category as it is often possible to determine the racial category of a person by examining physical remains, though what is actually being identified is the geographical phenotype.