Why Race Is Not Biology

The Science That Dismantles One of Humanity’s Most Harmful Myths

If you ask most people what race is, they will likely point to visible differences: skin color, hair texture, eye shape, facial features. They might say race is about where your ancestors came from — Africa, Europe, Asia, the Americas. They might treat these categories as natural, obvious, and rooted in biology.

They are wrong.

Not a little wrong. Fundamentally, scientifically, and historically wrong.

This is not an opinion. It is the consensus position of the American Anthropological Association, the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, and the vast majority of human geneticists working today. As the American Anthropological Association stated in its 1998 position paper on race: “Evidence from the analysis of genetics (e.g., DNA) indicates that most physical variation, about 94%, lies within so-called racial groups. Conventional geographic ‘racial’ groupings differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes” .

What does that mean? It means you are more genetically similar to a person of a different “race” who lives down the street from you than you are to many people who share your own skin color but live on the other side of the world.

Race, as biologists understand it, does not exist. What exists is human variation — and that variation tells a very different story.

The Genetic Reality: One Species, Endlessly Variable

Let us start with the most fundamental fact: all human beings belong to a single species, Homo sapiens. We share 99.9% of our DNA with every other person on this planet .

The remaining 0.1% accounts for all the visible differences between any two humans — height, eye color, hair texture, facial features, disease susceptibility, and yes, skin color. But here is the crucial point: that 0.1% of variation does not cluster neatly into racial groups.

When scientists analyze human genetic variation, they find that approximately 85-94% of all genetic differences occur within populations that live on the same continent. Only 6-15% of variation occurs between populations from different continents . A random person from Nigeria and a random person from Norway share more genetic similarities than either shares with many people from their own continent.

The American Anthropological Association puts it plainly: “In neighboring populations there is much overlapping of genes and their phenotypic (physical) expressions. Throughout history whenever different groups have come into contact, they have interbred. The continued sharing of genetic materials has maintained all of humankind as a single species” .

Physical Variation Does Not Map Onto Race

Most people assume that if people look different, those differences must align with deeper biological divisions. This assumption is false.

Consider skin color. It varies gradually across the globe, with darker skin near the equator and lighter skin toward the poles. But skin color does not predict other traits. As the American Anthropological Association notes, “Dark skin may be associated with frizzy or kinky hair or curly or wavy or straight hair, all of which are found among different indigenous peoples in tropical regions” .

The same is true for nose shape, eye shape, body proportions, and every other visible trait. These characteristics are inherited independently of one another. Knowing someone’s skin color tells you nothing about their hair texture, their blood type, their susceptibility to disease, or their ability to digest milk.

This is what scientists mean when they say race is not a biological category. The traits that people use to assign racial identities do not hang together as natural packages. They are independent adaptations to different environments, shuffled and reshuffled by migration and intermarriage over tens of thousands of years.

The Social Construction of Race

If race is not biological, where did it come from?

The answer is history — specifically, the history of European colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade.

As the American Anthropological Association explains, scholars today argue that “race as it is understood in the United States of America was a social mechanism invented during the 18th century to refer to those populations brought together in colonial America: the English and other European settlers, the conquered Indian peoples, and those peoples of Africa brought in to provide slave labor” .

From its inception, this concept of race was modeled after the Great Chain of Being — an ancient theological idea that all of creation was arranged in a hierarchy from lowest to highest, with God at the top and rocks at the bottom. Race was a mode of classification that placed Europeans at the top, Africans at the bottom, and Indigenous peoples somewhere in between .

This was not a neutral scientific observation. It was an ideology of inequality designed to justify slavery, colonization, and the brutal treatment of conquered and enslaved peoples. Proponents of slavery in the 19th century used race to argue that inequality was natural or God-given. They magnified the differences between Europeans, Africans, and Indians, created a rigid hierarchy, and provided the rationalization for treating some humans as less than human .

The concept of race was then exported to other parts of the world, where colonial powers used it to divide, rank, and control colonized peoples. By the late 19th century, it was being used by Europeans to rank one another and to justify social and economic inequalities within their own societies. The Nazis took this ideology to its horrifying conclusion: the extermination of 11 million people deemed “inferior” .

Race is real as a social construct. It has real effects on people’s lives. It determines who gets jobs, who gets loans, who gets pulled over by police, who receives adequate medical care. But its power comes from social and historical forces, not from biology.

As the Smithsonian Institution defines it, race is “a human-invented, shorthand term used to describe and categorize people into various social groups based on characteristics like skin color, physical features, and genetic heredity. Race, while not a valid biological concept, is a real social construction that gives or denies benefits and privileges” .

Where Racism Comes From

If race is not biological, why does racism exist?

Racism does not require biological reality to function. It only requires the belief that race is real.

Throughout history, people have used the concept of race to justify discrimination, violence, and exploitation. They have argued that certain races are inherently less intelligent, more prone to violence, less capable of self-governance, or biologically inferior. These claims have been repeatedly debunked by science — but they persist because they serve the interests of those in power.

The American Anthropological Association states clearly: “Present-day inequalities between so-called ‘racial’ groups are not consequences of their biological inheritance but products of historical and contemporary social, economic, educational, and political circumstances” .

This is not to say that biological differences between populations do not exist. They do. Certain genetic variants are more common in some populations than others. Sickle cell trait is more common in people of West African descent because it offers protection against malaria. Lactose tolerance is more common in people of Northern European descent because of a long history of dairy farming. Skin color varies with latitude because of UV exposure.

But these adaptations cut across racial lines. Sickle cell trait also appears in populations in India, Greece, and the Middle East — all regions with a history of malaria. Lactose tolerance appears in some African pastoralist populations, not just Europeans. Skin color varies continuously, with no sharp boundaries between so-called races.

These are local adaptations to local environments, not evidence of deeper biological divisions. As one genetics researcher put it, “There is no biological basis for race” — but racism, the social discrimination based on perceived race, is very real and has devastating effects .

Why This Matters for Medicine

The misconception that race is biological has real-world consequences — including in healthcare.

For decades, medical professionals have used race as a proxy for genetic differences, leading to flawed clinical algorithms and misdiagnoses. One notorious example is the use of race-based equations for estimating kidney function, which assumed that Black patients had higher baseline muscle mass and therefore adjusted their results downward — potentially delaying diagnosis of kidney disease in Black patients .

Similar race-based assumptions have been made about pain tolerance (with false beliefs that Black patients feel less pain), drug responses (assuming certain medications work differently based on race), and disease susceptibility. These assumptions are not supported by science. As a 2026 article in The BMJ notes, “the misuse of race in clinical equations can lead to prediction error and missed diagnoses” .

The consensus within modern genetics is clear: there is no biological basis for race. Yet this knowledge is not taught in most schools or medical curricula. As one researcher writes, “I only came across it as a postdoctoral researcher in a biology department” .

This is slowly changing. Race-free versions of the kidney function equation have recently been adopted in both the US and UK. Misleading references to biological race have been removed from some medical textbooks. But there is still a long way to go.

The Alternative: Understanding Clines

If race is not the right way to understand human biological variation, what is?

The answer is a concept called cline — a gradual change in a trait across geographic space. Skin color is a cline: it darkens gradually as you move toward the equator and lightens gradually as you move toward the poles. There are no sharp boundaries, no clear dividing lines where one “race” ends and another begins.

The same is true for other traits. Height, body proportions, blood type frequencies, and genetic variants all vary gradually across the globe. These variations reflect the history of human migration, adaptation to local environments, and genetic drift — not deep biological divisions.

This is why the idea of race falls apart under scientific scrutiny. You can draw a line on a map and call everyone on one side “white” and everyone on the other side “black,” but that line is arbitrary. The people immediately on either side of it are more similar to each other than either is to people of the “same race” living thousands of miles away.

Human variation is real. It is fascinating. It tells the story of our species’ journey across the planet. But it does not come in boxes. It comes in gradients.

What This Means for You

Understanding that race is not biological does not mean pretending that race does not matter. It matters enormously — because racism matters. Because people are treated differently based on how they are perceived. Because centuries of discrimination have created real, measurable inequalities in health, wealth, education, and opportunity.

But understanding that race is a social construct — not a biological reality — changes how we think about those inequalities. They are not the result of genetic differences between groups. They are the result of history, policy, and ongoing discrimination. And that means they can be changed.

If inequality were caused by biology, it would be fixed. Immutable. Permanent. But it is not. It is caused by human decisions — which means other humans can make different decisions.

As the American Anthropological Association concludes, “Racial myths bear no relationship to the reality of human capabilities or behavior. Scientists today find that reliance on such folk beliefs about human differences in research has led to countless errors” .

The science is clear. Race is not biology. It never was. And letting go of that myth — while still fighting the very real effects of racism — is one of the most important intellectual and moral tasks of our time.

References

American Anthropological Association. (1998). AAA statement on “race.” https://americananthro.org/about/policies/race-statement/

Kanwal, J. (2026). Race is not a biological category: Challenging this misconception will help tackle racism in healthcare. The BMJ, 392, s150. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.s150

McChesney, K. Y. (2015). Teaching diversity: The science you need to know to explain why race is not biological. SAGE Open, 5(4), 832-838. https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244015611712

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2023). What is race? What is ethnicity? In Advancing antiracism, diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEMM organizations: Beyond broadening participation. National Academies Press. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK593023/

Disclaimer: This article was researched and drafted with the assistance of AI. All sources are real and verifiable. Readers are encouraged to check the references themselves and draw their own conclusions.

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