A new study shatters the concept of race science by providing compelling evidence that genetics do not determine race. It does not attempt to explain why human races are formed in the first place. It also finds no genetic differences among humans that correspond to “race” as conceived in anthropological, genetic, sociological, and historical literatures. Instead, it supports the assertion of many anthropologists that human genetic differences across the world are best understood in terms of cultural history and geography.

The key results from this analysis are:
(1) There is considerable variability in genome-wide patterns of genetic ancestry among human populations that has no counterpart among inbred mice, suggesting that the concept of “race” cannot be reduced to a single genetic process.
(2) A genome-wide comparison of different human populations suggests that the variation observed in genome-wide patterns of human genetic ancestry cannot be reduced to a single or small number of genetic factors or processes. Rather, this variation is a combination of a large number of genome-wide factors, each one of which is individually quite small. This analysis of human populations should not be misinterpreted as invalidating concepts of human population differences based on historical and cultural factors, such as “race,” or as implying that “race” is genetically determined.