Is *race* a synonym of *species* or is just a common mistake?

Question

It's very common -- specially in fantasy and science-fiction -- to use race instead of species.

For example:

• “In Middle Earth (...) Aragorn (race: men) (...) Bilbo (race: hobbit)” 1
• “Tarkin's motivation was the enslavement of the Wookiee race for use as manual (...)”2
• “The human race has only one really effective weapon and that is laughter.”3

Shouldn't be used species instead?

From the Oxford dictionary:

species.

Biology. a group of living organisms consisting of similar individuals capable of exchanging genes or interbreeding. The species is the principal natural taxonomic unit, ranking below a genus and denoted by a Latin binomial, e.g. Homo sapiens.

race².

each of the major divisions of humankind, having distinct physical characteristics: people of all races, colours, and creeds.

Answer 1

No. In its entry for race the ‘Oxford English Dictionary's ’ first definition is 'A group of people, animals, or plants, connected by common descent or origin.'

Answer 2

It all comes down to sex - can they breed?

So you would probably have to troll the murkier corners of fan fiction to find sufficent examples of man-on-dwarf action to determine if they can interbreed.

Species is becoming a less useful term in biology with more genetic information and it's definition is now a bit fuzzy. Race is a good literary alternative.

Answer 3

At one level, the answer to your question "shouldn't [they] use 'species' instead?" is "Why should they use a technical, scientific word rather than an ordinary English word?".

Looking at it a different way, the set of circumstances we're talking about is the interaction of humans with something that's like humans but not quite human. In the present day, that is a purely fictional scenario - but in earlier centuries it was a reality, when Europeans encountered people who did not look or behave like them. Whether or not these others were of the same species or not was not apparent (and I'm not sure that the question would have been intelligible to many at the time) but it was immediately obvious that they were of different "race".

In time some scholars certainly decided that they were of different species (see for example Samuel Morton) but the divisions have always been referred to as "races" - though as Barrie says, the word has other meanings as well.

From our modern perspective, we know that all extant humans are of one species, so any subdivision can only be races (though nowadays such subdivisions are not regarded as meaningful by most scientiests). But I suggest that the experience of European explorers who first encountered different kinds of humans was very much akin to that of Terran explorers in Science Fiction who make the first contact with humanoid aliens.