The problem is the question itself, both the one you asked and the one the researchers asked. Is it recognizing ethnicity or race? Clumping ethnicities as "race

The problem is the question itself, both the one you asked and the one the researchers asked. Is it recognizing ethnicity or race? Clumping ethnicities as "race" is the social construct. It's not just skin that is different between people. If a certain culture prizes certain features in people, people with those traits will breed more, thus amplifying biological features within a socio-cultural group. My question is, using medical imaging can it particularly identify say people of african origin but it cannot tell apart east vs west africans? Can it uniquely identify asians but can it not tell apart an indian person from a Korean? Or given proper training can it discern between north and south koreans or between a french person and a greek person? Race is a social construct not because groups of people are all identical but because both science and major-religion have concluded that humans share a common human(homosapien) ancestry, therefore there is one human race and multiple ethnicities and geographical super-ethnicities (south east asian and north european for example). Edit: This is also why race on id cards is silly. Not because you don't want to identify people based on appearance but because ethnicity is more granular and leads to less confusion. Would it be more identifying to say indian or asian? African or north-african? I strongly believe the modern black/white/asian "race" is a darwinian invention to try and understand and classify nature better, based on intuition instead of science.