In my post below I quoted my interview L. L. Cavalli-Sforza because I think it gets to the heart of some confusions which have emerged since the finding that most variation on any given locus is found within populations, rather than between them. The standard figure is that 85% of genetic variance is within continental races, and 15% is between them. You can see some Fst values on Wikipedia to get an intuition. Concretely, at a given locus X in population 1 the frequency of allele A may be 40%, while in population 2 it may be 45%. Obviously the populations differ, but the small difference is not going to be very informative of population substructure when most of the difference is within populations. But there are loci which are much more informative. Interestingly, one controls variation on a trait which you are familiar with, skin color (unless you happen to lack vision). A large fraction (on the order of 25-40%) of the between population variance in the complexion of Africans and Europeans can be predicted by substitution on one SNP in the gene SLC24A5. The substitution has a major phenotypic effect, and, exhibits a great deal of between population variation. One variant is nearly fixed in Europeans, and another is nearly fixed in Africans. In other words the component of genetic variance on this trait that is between population is nearly 100%, not 15%. This illustrates that the 15% value was an average across the genome, and in fact there are significant differences on the genetic level which can be ancestrally informative. You can take this to the next level: increase the number of ancestrally informative markers to obtain a fine-grained picture of population structure. In the illustration above the top panel shows the frequencies at the SNP mentioned earlier on SLC24A5. The second panel shows variation at another SNP controlling skin color, SLC45A2. This second SNP is useful in separating South and Central Asians from Europeans and Middle Easterners, if not perfectly so. In other words, the more markers you have, the better your resolution of inter-population difference. This is why I found the following comment very interesting:
Razib's final concession (that genetic variation exists) is revealing because I think that's as far as the argument can really be taken. It's a bit of a strawman, in that people who argue that race is entirely a social construct don't actually deny that human genetic variation exists. What they deny is that there are non-arbitrary and mutually exclusive categories into which humans can be resolved. This is, I think, the point being made by the "Race by Fingerprints" etc. rhetorical device cited earlier. In other words, it may be possible for any particular phenotypic trait or genetic locus to be resolved into a strictly cladistic system but humans, being an amalgam of such traits and locii, defy such resoution. So while the study of human genetic variation does, indeed, have "instrumental utility" the concept of biological races is, itself, an arcahic relic.
As I noted below, the comment doesn't make sense. Here is a PCA of world populations using 250,000 markers:
