It means two people of different races can have a baby together, but two people of the same sex cannot.
These kinds of properties/classifications are, I claim, more "natural", as far as biology. These groupings into classes are more natural (based on biological properties) than groupings into "races".
Distinctions between categories are often somewhat fuzzy, but in some cases there are processes independent of peoples’ opinions that behave largely like there are distinct buckets. Such as “has a left arm”.
With “race”, while there are certainly correlations between various genes and where one was born (and where one’s grandparents were born), and correlations between genes and other genes (which is partially explained by the correlations with location), any lines one may draw to split humanity into “races” will be fairly arbitrary, and at least substantially more arbitrary than splitting by whether someone is male or female (even though there are edge cases there as well; like I said, categories are often a little bit fuzzy).
Now, there may be other concepts that are even less real than race, but I don’t know if any of them are cared about enough to - oh, astrological signs! A person’s astrological signs are probably even less real than race, and people care enough about them to give them names.
I’m willing to talk about the radius of a helium atom even though there is no sharp cut-off in distance beyond which the amplitude for an electron being found there becomes zero.
But not every k-means clustering on a dataset reflects a real separation into types. Just because people draw lines in their model of the world, and just because these lines are sometimes useful, doesn’t mean those lines cleave reality at the joints.
And yet sometimes they are useful. Prople whose lineage originates in different places (race, if you will) do have medically significant differences (see the literature).
So, if by “race” one means “melanin content and geographic location of ancestors”, then that is a real thing. But the way these vary do not come in any particular natural grouping into categories; “race”, in the sense of a categorical variable (not just the concept of ancestry more generally), isn’t real, or, at least, it is less real than the distinction between male and female.
If one has a random real-valued variable which has a continuous distribution, it may be useful to chunk it up into discrete buckets even if the way of chunking ends up being fairly arbitrary. Having a way of chunking it up into intervals being useful doesn’t imply that the arbitrary chunking is actually a natural categorical variable.
The only race we can truly define is homo sapiens sapiens.
This is a pretty controversial statement. Even studied anthropologists disagree with this.
I'll concede that much in the way of "race" is a social construct, but to claim there's no biology involved is categorically false.
If color defines a race, surely white korean people are the same race as Irish and German people and most malaysians are blacks right?
What about people born from parents with way different skin tones or any other characteristic you can think of?
And why aren't blond haired people not considered a different race than white people with brown hair? Why are ginger haired people.often discriminated? There are a lot of other characteristics than skin color we inherit from our parents, some are considered diseases, or syndromes, other not. The only difference with skin color is that we don't necessarily prejudice based on them, mostly because theses differences are less visible. Races is mostly a societal construct to discriminate people.
that's what I'm trying to point out with this example: https://www.npr.org/2009/02/02/100057939/your-family-may-onc...
Race is the word we use to do exactly that. It's not perfect, but it's what we have.
A much more useful concept is ethnicity