Using Ethnicity as a Classification Variable in Health Research: Perpetuating the myth of biological determinism, serving socio-political agendas, or making valuable contributions to medical sciences?

There is a need for a valid way to classify the human species consistently and reliably, be it to highlight similarities between human populations such as intelligence or physical capacity, to dispel myths about group differences, or to discover 'novel' risk factors for diseases. In contrast to racial divisions, which are usually based on differences in skin colour and physical features, ethnicity is a complex concept which has both …