There is a resurgence of interest in using self-identified race to capture at least part of the genetic differences between population groups. This has been fueled in part by research that indicates that data from multiple loci on the human genome can provide fairly accurate characterization of individuals into continental ancestral groups that approximate our current racial categories.124 Data on “continental ancestry” have been used to suggest that there is value in race as a biological category. In fact, Risch and colleagues124 concluded that “the greatest genetic structure that exists in the human population occurs at the racial level.” However, Serre and Pablo125 have reanalyzed data from the largest study of human genetic variation to date, and have shown that sampling biases play a key role in conclusions about the degree of continental clustering of populations. They found that when individuals are sampled from around the world in a way that reflects the geographic distribution of humans across continents, the human gene pool does not consist of continental clusters, but reflects gradients of allele frequencies across the world. This absence
