Safe keeping Lieberman and Jackson 1995 Keep this here for a while I think S P bo s paper is better on this idea Also the part of their criticism about a priori assigning groups is now moot because groups are discovered a posterori in recent years Lieberman and Jackson 1995 have observed that these studies which emphasize the divergence of European Asian and African lineages neatly confrom to the classic racial taxonomy of Caucasian Mongoloid and Negroid However they emphasize that the molecular and biochemical proponents of this model explicitly use racial categories in their initial grouping of samples For example the large and highly diverse macroethnic groups of East Indians North Africans and Europeans are presumptively grouped as Caucasians prior to the analysis of their DNA variation This limits and skews interpretations obscures other lineage relationships deemphasizes the impact of more immediate clinal environmental factors on genomic diversity and can cloud our understanding of the true patterns of affinity They argue that however significant the empirical research these studies use the term race in conceptually sloppy ways The suggest that the authors of these studies find support for racial distinctions only because they began assuming the validity of race For empirical reasons we prefer to place emphasis on clinal variation which recognizes the existence of adaptive human hereditary variation and simultaneously stresses that such variation is not found in packages that can be labeled races They do not dispute the importance of this research only its reliance on the word race when reference to populations and clinal gradations are more than adequate to describe the results