[Rabbahpuptiopp]

I think race being used as a valid scientific distinction is bordering on the ideas that various people have used in the past to say that white people are superior to black people, and visa versa. This articles about super volcanoes and the Toba euruption really puts a little kink in their argument about the differences between races, especially this quote:
Stanley Ambrose, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois, suggested in 1998 that Rampino's work might explain a curious bottleneck in human evolution: The blueprints of life for all humans -- DNA -- are remarkably similar given that our species branched off from the rest of the primate family tree a few million years ago.

Ambrose has said early humans were perhaps pushed to the edge of extinction after the Toba eruption -- around the same time folks got serious about art and tool making. Perhaps only a few thousand survived. Humans today would all be descended from these few, and in terms of the genetic code, not a whole lot would change in 74,000 years. It seems that with only a few thousand surviving the eurption that we are more closly related to each other than was previously thought. Our differences are little more than skin deep. If this eruption never had occured, then maybe their would be a real differences between the various races of mankind rather than the ones we like to make up using dodgy science.