You're picking a single definition of race from the OED, but there are multiple definitions. They somewhat overlap, but they aren't all the same concept.

> A group of people sharing the same culture, history, language, etc.; an ethnic group.

> A group or set of people or things with a common feature or features.

> literary A group of people descended from a common ancestor.

> archaic mass noun Ancestry.

https://www.lexico.com/definition/race (Lexico uses the OED). Language and culture can be correlated with ancestry, but they are not the same thing. You can pick ancestry as the definition of race, but why not use the already existing term "ancestry"? The definition of words can change over time as we gain knowledge, but I just don't think it's useful to pretend that the most common and best definition of race is genetic rather than social.

This is what I said originally: "Race is correlated with and impacted by ancestry/genetics, but it is not how race is defined." I believe this is an accurate description of how the ancestral posts used "race".

> These texts contain statistical associations between politically sensitive terms, negative terms, (and so on). However they are not racist, are not born of any racist project, and most humans reading them would be moved to more positively regard racial terms.

This is discussing the social racial classifications. This would be referring to Black as the US racial category, what you would call the US Black caste. It's not discussing genetics at all.

> alcohol or milk ... Europeans, North Siberian and Alaskan peoples, and East-Asian peoples

These are ethnic groupings of people. You can find statistical genetic differences between these groups which we have socially defined, but they are not defined in terms of genetics. Are you not European if you are lactose intolerant? Are you not Alaskan Native if you can drink milk? Measuring a difference between categories does not mean that's how the categories were defined.

(Side note: please don't assume native people metabolize alcohol differently. There are strong sociological factors which make it difficult to pin on biology, there are mixed results with genetics, and heritability encompasses genetics, culture, and sociological status https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_and_Native_Americans#C... )

> That is not the common way to determine race (visible differences). Genetic markers are generally the indicator (eg Ancestry.com).

This is the same assertion you're making, but it's not the same definition which was used in the ancestral comments.

> originally actually craniometric definitions ... Even imperfect concepts and approaches have their utility

> population genetics in both current populations and archeological remains? Those groups are racial categories.

The trouble with your definition is that you're defining race as any useful distinction based on genetics. Were the craniometric definitions of race useful? Did they help with discovering/communicating new scientific findings, or did those categorizations hinder progress with arbitrary categories? You can't say that categorizing data is useful, race is a categorization, therefore race is useful. You have to specify which metric you're using to form the racial categorization because there are an infinite number of ways to categorize data.

>> For example, check out this plot of genetic differences in Europe. The differences smoothly smear out over the geography.

> Yes, and that tells you a lot about the population of Europe. So clearly this is useful.

What were the pre-genetic racial categories which helped the analysis? Why should clusters in population genetics be called racial categories?