The relationship between race and genetics has relevance for the ongoing controversies regarding race.

Ongoing genetic research has investigated how ancestral human populations migrated in the ancestral geographic environment into different geographic areas. Today it is possible to determine, by genetic analysis, the geographic ancestry of a person and the degree of ancestry from each region. Such analyses can pinpoint the migrational history of a person's ancestors with a high degree of accuracy. Often, due to practices of group endogamy, allele frequencies cluster locally around kin groups and lineages, or by national, cultural or linguistic boundaries - giving a detailed degree of correlation between genetic clusters and population groups when considering many alleles simultaneously.

However, biological variation of any single human genetic trait is often described best as clinal, with gradual transitions of trait frequencies between different population clusters. Furthermore, different clines don't align around the same centers, constructing a much more complex picture of variation than merely large continental groupings. In the past, like today, all populations were genetically heterogeneous with larger degrees of variation within the groups than between them. This means that concepts of "pure" and "mixed" ancestry are problematic to work with.

Richard Charles "Dick" Lewontin (born March 29, 1929) is an American evolutionary biologist, geneticist and social commentator. A leader in developing the mathematical basis of population genetics and evolutionary theory, he pioneered the application of techniques from molecular biology such as gel electrophoresis to questions of genetic variation and evolution.

In a pair of 1966 papers co-authored with J.L. Hubby in the journal Genetics, Lewontin helped set the stage for the modern field of molecular evolution.

In 1979 he and Stephen Jay Gould introduced the term "spandrel" into evolutionary theory.

Lewontin strongly opposes genetic determinism, especially as allegedly expressed by sociobiology and evolutionary psychology.

Lewontin was born in New York City to Jewish parents. Lewontin attended Forest Hills High School and the École Libre des Hautes Études in New York. In 1951, he obtained a bachelor's degree in biology from Harvard University. In 1952, he received a master's degree in mathematical statistics followed by a doctorate in zoology in 1954, both from Columbia University where he was a student of Theodosius Dobzhansky. Lewontin held faculty positions at North Carolina State University, the University of Rochester, and the University of Chicago. In 1973 Lewontin served as Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Professor of Biology at Harvard until 1998, and as of 2003 was the Alexander Agassiz Research Professor at Harvard. Lewontin has worked with and had great influence on many philosophers of biology, including William C. Wimsatt, Elliott Sober, Philip Kitcher, Elisabeth Lloyd, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Sahotra Sarkar, and Robert Brandon, often inviting them to work in his lab.

Alondra Nelson is an American academic and writer. She is Associate Professor of Sociology at Columbia University in the City of New York. She holds an appointment in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia. From 2003-2009, she was Assistant Professor of African American Studies, American Studies and Sociology at Yale University, where she was the recipient of the Poorvu Family Award for Interdisciplinary Teaching. At Yale, she was also the first African American woman to join the Department of Sociology faculty.

Nelson earned a B.A. in Anthropology(magna cum laude) from the University of California at San Diego in 1994. She earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from New York University in 2003.

From an interdisciplinary social science perspective, Nelson writes about the intersection of science, technology, medicine and African diasporic experience. Named one of "13 Notable Blacks In Technology" By AOL Black Voices, she established the Afrofuturism on-line community in 1998 and edited an eponymous special issue of the journal Social Text in 2002. She is also co-editor Technicolor: Race, Technology and Everyday Life, one of the first scholarly works to examine the racial politics of contemporary technoculture. Nelson recently contributed a chapter to Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture (The MIT Press, 2008) edited by Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky. Her writing and commentary have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe,The Guardian (London) and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among other publications.

Dalton Clark Conley (born 1969) is an American sociologist. He is University Professor (with appointments in Sociology, Medicine and Public Policy) and formerly served as the Dean for the Social Sciences and Chair of the Department of Sociology at New York University. He also holds appointments as an Adjunct Professor of Community Medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, as a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and as Dean of Arts and Sciences (pro bono) for the University of the People. In 2005, Conley became the first sociologist to win the National Science Foundation's Alan T. Waterman Award. He is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow.

He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a B.A. in Humanities, and from Columbia University with and an M.P.A. in Public Policy, and a Ph.D. in Sociology. He also holds an M.S. and M.Phil. in Biology from NYU.

Conley is best known for his contributions to understanding how socioeconomic status is transmitted across generations.

Neil deGrasse Tyson ( /ˈniːəl dəˈɡræs ˈtaɪsən/ born October 5, 1958) is an American astrophysicist and science communicator. He is currently the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space, and a research associate in the department of astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History. Since 2006 he has hosted the educational science television show NOVA scienceNOW on PBS, and has been a frequent guest on The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Real Time with Bill Maher, and Jeopardy!. It was announced on August 5, 2011, that Tyson will be hosting a new sequel to Carl Sagan's Cosmos: A Personal Voyage television series.

Tyson was born as the second of three children in the borough of Manhattan in New York City, but was raised in the Bronx. His mother, Sunchita Feliciano Tyson, was a gerontologist and his father, Cyril deGrasse Tyson, was a sociologist, human resource commissioner for the New York City mayor, John Lindsay, and was the first Director of HARYOU. Tyson attended the Bronx High School of Science (1972–1976, astrophysics emphasis) where he was captain of the wrestling team and was editor-in-chief of the school's Physical Science Journal. Tyson had an abiding interest in astronomy from the age of eleven, following his visit to the Hayden Planetarium at age nine. Tyson recalls that "so strong was that imprint [of the night sky] that I'm certain that I had no choice in the matter, that in fact, the universe called me." He obsessively studied astronomy in his teens, and eventually even gained some fame in the astronomy community by giving lectures on the subject at the age of fifteen.