The most that can be said about races is that they are statistically biased toward certain positive and negative qualities by their genetic makeup. However, these are generally not significant enough to consider them anything other than minor variations; they are not even distinct enough to be categorized as separate subspecies, which would be one of the largest breaks for that argument. They are, as one imagines, regional variations that have adaptive qualities to favor that environment they found themselves in. In the more modern era, these are not generally that important - technology takes the place of many of these biological advantages, but not always - yet there are outliers that would be considered remarkably beneficial. This also works in reverse in the sense that disadvantages are mostly mitigated.
It also is worthy to keep in mind that speaking only from a pure numbers perspective, the vast majority of people will have roughly the same number of advantages and disadvantages regardless of race; people are more likely to be average than anything else. Certainly some traits will be more useful now than they were before, that is just the reality of things, such as having a bias (but not exclusivity) toward a higher than average intelligence and upper threshold of it, but it regularly will not be significant enough to matter. There are too many other factors when dealing with humans that are more likely to change that outcome. It is easier to say, measure the success of average mountain lions in their predation than measuring the success of average people doing so, even with access to primitive tools to establish a baseline from.
Even if we took an example to an extreme, it is unlikely to have every day proof in action. Over an aggregate long term this is true, but the human dynamic is outpacing evolutionary design. You are more likely to see your exceptional or above average of any race do better than those par for the course who have just a less pronounced advantage. This is more to the advance of technology, culture, society, et cetera.
In short, yes, race does technically exist as well as it does influence positive and negative, speaking only to natural potential, but what it accounts for in modern factoring is not really all that large. The individual themselves have significantly more power than that.
Well put Cat-Man, though a slight comment on the fact that while extremely broad phenotypical attributes exist, these don't match up well with what we consider race in today's world (going by the very American concept of 5 races). So while there absolutely is diversity, these don't really boil down to white, black, Asian, Eskimo etc.
The reason that human races aren't useful is that they're actually only looking at a couple of phenotypic markers and (a) these phenotypes don't map well to underlying genetics and (b) don't usefully model the underlying populations. The big thing that racial typing is based on is skin colour, but skin colour is controlled by only a small number of alleles. On the basis of skin colour you'd think the big division in human diversity is (and I simplify) between white Europeans and black Africans. However, there is vastly more genetic diversity within Africa than there is anywhere else. Two randomly chosen Africans will be, on average, more diverse from each other than two randomly chosen Europeans. What's more Europeans are no more genetically distinct overall from a randomly chosen African than two randomly chosen Africans are from each other.
This makes perfectly decent sense if you consider the deep roots of diversity within Africa (where humans originally evolved) to the more recent separation of Europeans from an African sub-population.So the issue is more with the concept of race itself and how we as a society attempted to group people when our understanding of genetics was still very primitive.
EDIT: It's also worth noting that while humans are indeed animals, the way humans have evolved is fairly unique when compared to other species our human specific discoveries of social societies and medicine largely offset 'natural selection' from their introduction into human life. Meaning that it was no longer just the most physically superior who were breeding.
There is also the concept of genetic drift which is very high in humans for the same reason, we retain mutations a lot easier because we have a greater ability than any other species to keep ourselves alive.
So yes the arbitrary 1900s grouping of races is defunct at this point, its a very very simplified phenotype grouping and doesn't hold up well.
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