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I actually agree with Papaya's main premise, that the conception of race, although rather loosely coined nowadays, has an obvious genetic inference. I mean, on average, two East Asian individuals will have more similar DNA sequences than those of an East Asian individual compared with a Caucasian individual. Can anyone deny this?
However, I also agree that the detailed genetic correlations of physical appearance and DNA sequence are still very tenuous at this point. But it is not inconceivable that those correlations will be made clear sometime in the future, when technology has vastly advanced. We already know which alleles influence eye color, skin pigment, widows peak hairline, etc. To me, it seems entirely reasonable that geneticists in the future will be able to take blood samples from a crime scene and say with confidence, "Ah, this was a Caucasian woman."
In anthropological terms, a race is basically a giant extended family, with a relatively recent common ancestor compared to other races. Humanity is thought to have originated in Africa, but as different tribes separated and colonized new lands, they diverged rapidly on the evolutionary tree (although not enough to speciate), often due to environmental pressure, but also frequently just due to random chance from founders effect. Relative genetic isolation eventually manifested in peoples with discernible physical differences from region to region, and although genetically mixing always occurred, it was far less influential on the gene pool than the far more substantial inbreeding (the evolutionary kind, not the ew kind) within geographic locales.
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