> Race is not a biological construct, as writer Elizabeth Kolbert explains in this issue, but a social one that can have devastating effects. This is inane, as

> Race is not a biological construct, as writer Elizabeth Kolbert explains in this issue, but a social one that can have devastating effects. This is inane, as it conflates the connotation of "race" and the very useful concept of a "population". We should all be aware enough to know the terrible history of the idea of race. But there are well known distributions of certain features among different populations, melanin being one of them, physical prowess another, but also body height and weight. Everyone can see folks from East Africa excell at long distance running, and athletes of Caribbean descent in sprint events. Jews excell at winning Nobel prizes and wars in which they are insanely outnumbered. If you want you can call it an "overrepresenation", but that is really wording. If it becomes fashionable to view facts that denote population distributions as racist we as a society have lost, for the foundation of having discussions based on reason and truth will have been considerably diminished. Putting it simply: If you give me a 1000 pictures from folks from Kongo, and 1000 pictures of Inuit, I'll eat my hat if I can't correctly identify the origin of 99% of them. (Never discount the possibility of a Kongolese moving to Qaqortoq a hundred years ago.)