No. Tribalism is not even a uniquely human behavior.
And who decides if 99.5% is enough? It's an arbitrary benchmark. Per Darwinian laws, organisms are always incentivized to favor themselves and their kin. If there is a way to discriminate, which is facilitated by the fact that human races have widely varying phenotypes, they will always choose to do so.
Skin colour is perhaps among the least problematic factors when it comes to integration. This is why it's the integrationists who try to reduce race to skin colour.
The fact that race is a continuum and not a discrete variable doesn't make it unreal. This is not even always true because when there are major geographic barriers, e.g., deserts, mountain ranges, and oceans, there are no contact populations that sit on the borderline.
Who said it has to be immutable?
There are races and subraces. The fact that you can differentiate them proves that they are not the same.
1. Tribalism is based on "perceived" differences. Social constructs are socially constructed by societies to create things that SEEM like reality but aren't really the case. This only strengthens my points.
2. That "99.5" is a minimum. It's up to 99.9%, but the average is more in the 99.7-99.8% range. A species ultimately is defined by the ability to create fertile offspring. A so-called white man can create fertile offspring with a so-called brown woman. It should also be worth noting that chimpanzees have notably more genetic diversity than humans. This means that the "differences" between humans aren't even enough to create subspecies let alone "races". Would it even be correct to call the "different humans" by the term "breeds"? Humans have different skin colours and morphology due to selective pressures; it doesn't create separate species or "races" of humans.
3. The fact that this "continuum" has been debated and revised only proves it's a social construct. We know that gravity is a hard law. We know that energy cannot be created or destroyed; it only changes form. But "race" and perceptions of "race" change constantly. Even between the Anglos who largely developed this concept, there is no unanimous agreement. Do we go with the British census which arbitrarily labels physically diverse Southern European populations as "white" or do we go with the US census that lumps various "Europeans" and "West Asians" and "North Africans" as "white"? In reality, both are wrong. It's no dilemma at all if you know that race is a social construct.
4. If it's not immutable and is subject to time and opinion, it isn't a meaningful concept, let alone a reality.
5. Why is there that distinction between "Middle Easterners" and "Europeans" that just doesn't exist in global population studies? In each and every single global population study, these populations overlap with each other.
These distinctions are formed by REGIONAL studies. Regional studies is where we see "statistically significant" differences between "Middle Easterners" and "Europeans". But why is that?
When you compare just Europeans and Middle Easterners, the genetic differences between them become more apparent. This is because you're focusing on the distinctions that have arisen through their respective histories of migration, isolation, and admixture relative to each other.
However, when you broaden the comparison to include populations from more genetically distant regions like Central Asia or West Africa, the genetic similarities between Europeans and Middle Easterners become much more pronounced. In this global context, they cluster together more closely, reflecting their shared deeper ancestry and historical connections within the broader "West Eurasian" supercluster.
Think of it like this analogy:
Imagine comparing two types of apples, like a Granny Smith and a Red Delicious. If you only compare these two, their differences in colour, texture, and taste are quite noticeable.
But if you then bring in a banana, an orange, and a grape, the differences between the Granny Smith and Red Delicious apples suddenly seem much smaller in comparison to the differences between the apples and the other fruits. The apples are clearly more similar to each other than they are to the banana, orange, or grape.
Even when we just compare between "Middle Easterners" and "Europeans" we see populations that lie between two the ends. Greeks, Italians, Turks, European Jews and so forth. Do these populations constitute a "mixed race"? No, because these two regions in particular have always had gene flow between them. Because of said gene flow, some "Europeans" are closer to some "Middle Easterners" than between other "Europeans" and other "Middle Easterners". A "Kurd" is closer to an "Italian" they they are a Saudi. A "Sicilian" is closer to a "Lebanese" than he is an "Englishman" or "Swede" or even a "Sardinian". Sharing a continent doesn't mean you are closer to EVERYONE within that continent than others outside of it.
The irony is if "race" existed, Western Eurasians would constitute a "race" and there would be no arbitrary distinctions between the "side" of Western Eurasia one lies.
