It is both a social construct as well as a physically real thing. Those two things aren't mutually exclusive, and more people need to understand that. Most of t

It is both a social construct as well as a physically real thing. Those two things aren't mutually exclusive, and more people need to understand that. Most of the debate in this area is language games. Consider running a PCA on a matrix of everyone's alleles < actually, this is legit interesting, has anyone done it? >. Hypothesis: A bunch of the top few components will correspond to commonly understood racial groups that people have created based on observable phenotypic clusters. In this sense, it's a real physical thing. Duh. However, at the same time, the components are an abstraction, and the common conceptualization of what these components mean and how they relate to reality is somewhat of a mental construction. There will be other high variance components that don't relate to racial categories. We probably don't even notice them. And our racial categories probably don't map that cleanly to the actual underlying components.