[inglor_cz]

Ever more complicated attempts to bridge the gap by muddying the waters.

Frankly, even a freshly arrived alien from Mars or Titan could easily tell Icelanders, Mongols and Xhosa apart, without knowing anything about our culture. The fact that there has been a lot of interbreeding/admixture since the Age of Sail began, does not mean that there aren't meaningful biological differences between the original groups, which still obviously exist.

An analogy: much like the existence of twilight does not render the concept of night and day a 'social construct' either. We attach certain social meanings to those natural phenomena, and a 'working day' can easily stretch into 'astronomical night' (all too often!), but that does not mean that 'night' and 'day' do not exist outside of our cultural reference framework.

There is a social concept of 'race' which corresponds to the 'working day' concept in this analogy, e.g. 'BIPOC', claiming Asians as 'white adjacent' or classifying North Africans or Jews as 'white', even though they may not necessarily look white. But this is almost certainly not what the AI identified. This social concept of race would confuse a Martian alien unless he started to study the social and racial history of the U.S., and possibly even afterwards. It definitely confuses me, a random observer from Central Europe.

[AlotOfReading]

One of the major issues with biological race realism is that common race classifications do not form monophyletic groupings. If you already have a set of definitions you need to fit, any sufficiently large set of features can trivially classify those categories. It doesn't matter if the groups are race or "people who like licorice". When the features and population sizes aren't uniformly distributed, you can even get very strong correlations, without there being a meaningful underlying basis.

The social definition is used because that's a most scientifically meaningful and useful definition that avoids many of the issues with biological race realism.