People in our society differ in how they think about genetic differences. There are people who think that race matters a great deal and other you think it doesn't matter. It's useful to have a metric that distinguishes those people.

If you have that metric you can ask interesting questions such as whether people who are well calibrated are more likely to score high on that metric. It's interesting whether the metric changes from year to year.

That means the question tries to point at a property that people disagree about. In this case it's whether genetic differences are important. The question doesn't define "important" but there are various right wing people such as neoreocons and red-pill-folks who identify with the term "human biodiversity". The question doesn't try to ask for a specific well-defined belief but points to that cluster of beliefs. It's the same way that the feminism question doesn't point to a well-defined belief. You don't need a well-defined belief to get valuable information from a poll.

The question made it into the the survey because I complained about the usage of tribal labels such as liberal/conversative where people have to pick one choice as a way to measure political beliefs. I argued that focusing on agreement on issues is more meaningful and provides better data.