In a multi-state study of assisted living , for instance, University of North Carolina researchers found that a host of variables—the facility's type, size or age; whether a chain owned it; how attractive the neighborhood was—had no significant relationship to how the residents fared in terms of illness, mental decline, hospitalizations or mortality.

But when the researchers plugged in a number of other variables, such differences disappeared.

a basis for explaining human genetic diversityan aid to understanding different populationsan explanation for social and cultural differencesa term to describe individual human characteristicsmodern genetics research is likely to fuel racial conflictsrace is a poorly defined marker of human genetic diversityrace as a biological term can explain human genetic diversitygenetics research should consider social and cultural variablesit is absolutely necessary to put race aside in making diagnosisit is important to include social variables in genetics researchracial categories for genetic diversity could lead to wrong clinical predictionsdiscrimination against black people may cause negligence in clinical treatmentThey be more precise with the language they use.

They examine all possible variables in their research.

The researchers also acknowledged that there are a few areas where race as a construct might still be useful in scientific research: as a political and social, but not biological, variable.

So what other variables could be used if the racial concept is thrown out? Yudell said scientists need to get more specific with their language, perhaps using terms like ancestry or population that might more precisely reflect the relationship between humans and their genes, on both the individual and population level.

And at the vast majority of places, it is simply not a big variable in the college's decision-making process.

What we have to do is make sure we know what these are and take into account all the possible variables

first, they explain that if a given variable is playing a role in affecting well-being, then we should expect any change in that variable to correlate with the observed changes in well-being.

If not, it is not plausible that the variable is a causal factor.