I submitted these links to display early 2000's thinking about race. You'll note that the two articles display diametrically-opposed viewpoints. One point that

I submitted these links to display early 2000's thinking about race. You'll note that the two articles display diametrically-opposed viewpoints. One point that is often missed in discussions about genetic relatedness is that the markers most useful for discriminating between racial groups are in so-called 'junk DNA' regions. For genes that relate to protein function (and thus, organismal function), humans vary little, Here's a quote from the Cooper article: The success of microsatellite loci in classifying persons according to continental group depends in part on the cumulative effect of minor differences in the frequencies of common alleles and in part on the effect of population-specific alleles. In neither case is it apparent that such differences have relevance for traits that are important to health. Most population-specific microsatellite alleles are unlikely to be functional; rather, like a last name, they merely help to verify the geographic origin of a person's ancestry. Accumulated small differences in common alleles will yield differences in population risk only if a disease is caused primarily by interactions among multiple loci, and this is both mathematically and biologically implausible.