A third option in the debate of race vs species.

Kin/kind/kindred
People
Nation
Tribe

Lots of nuance between these different choices.

Scientifically speaking, there's no such thing as race. There's species and subspecies. Beyond that, there are ethnic groups and there's geographical variation. All modern humans (i.e. everyone alive today) are the same species and subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens. This is based on the amount of genetic divergence, i.e. way less than people think. We're all descended from a very recent African population, probably from around 60,000 years ago. Compared to Neandertals for example, who are usually classified as a different species - their lineage and ours split somewhere around 600,000 - 1 million years ago. More than ten times the amount of genetic difference.

For fantasy peoples, if you're going to be technical, they should be called different species, unless they are actually closely enough related to us to be classified as Homo sapiens. As there's no scientific definition of race, in this context it's fairly meaningless. If you want a better term then I'd suggest different peoples. I am vehemently against the notion that only Homo sapiens sapiens people can be called people or human. Scientifically, "human" is any species in the genus Homo. Hominin is any species in the human clade/lineage since we split from the chimpanzee/bonobo clade/lineage.

I would use "person" for any species that has a similar level of intelligence to a human. I also support "great ape personhood" legislation, so therefore wouldn't just use "people" for species that have exactly equal intelligence to humans. So for various fantasy and alien peoples, this word seems the best choice for me.

I've taken to using "people" in this way a lot, because species names for earlier human species sound too coldly scientific, like you said in your post, plus most species names are a pain in the arse to pluralise* (there's no plural, you have one Homo sapiens, one Homo erectus or you have lots of Homo sapiens, lots of Homo erectus) but writing about a Homo erectus person or Homo erectus people, for example, not only gets over the grammar issue but also recognises their personhood. One of my current WIPs, the MC is a cloned Neandertal in a contemporary setting (well, 2050s, that's nearly contemporary...) and have the problem that there's no word for modern humans besides Homo sapiens sapiens, anatomically modern humans (AMHs), etc. Even Cro-Magnons won't do because that's a name for a population found in Europe (i.e. the first Homo sapiens to move into Europe from Africa), so I've taken to referring to modern humans as Homo sapiens people. My MC considers himself to be a different species of human and a Neandertal (spelled the modern way without the H, and frequently annoyed by anyone who spells it with an H).

*please don't use "Homo sapien" (or worse, homosapien) as a singular for Homo sapiens... *shudders* ...don't even go there! It's like wearing a badge that says "I know nothing! I can't even spell my own name!"

Also note that while Neandertal is the correct modern spelling of the place in Germany, an up-to-date spelling of the name for the human species, the Latin name retains the H, i.e. Homo neanderthalensis. The pronunciation has always been "Neander-tal" and "neander-tal-ensis" for the English and Latin names respectively.

Here's a great article that can help.... https://randyellefson.wordpress.com/2013/04/28/fantasy-species-vs-race/

I'm pretty sure that if you're creating an imaginary world with imaginary beings of different taxonomic ranks, you can get away with creating an imaginary word to describe these collective beings.

Let's just go with blurgs.

I agree with The Urban Spaceman, you either create a new imaginary word or describe without specifying on the gender, race, etc.!

If a group of fantasy beings are clearly humanoid, can interbreed with humans, and arose on the same world (from the same evolutionary lineage, or created to be similar if it's that kind of fantasy setting), then I'd go with the term race.

For fantasy beings who evolved on the same world but are clearly more different from us than our closest living relatives on Earth today (say you have cat people, or bird people or whatever), I'd go with calling them different species. As for aliens who evolved on a different planet? Species is not really a strong enough word to describe the level of difference. Maybe a new word like lineage, or Earth clan vs Centaurian clan, or something would work.

I don't really get knocked out when aliens in SF are referred to as different species, though. Obviously they are, even if they are less related to us than any species from Earth.

I am a purist. If they can breed together they're a race. If they can't, they're a species. Just because everyone's done it wrong for a long time isn't reason for me to not fix it. Whenever I see someone use race where they mean species I assume they picked it up from video games, personally.

Similarly I'm not a big fan of seeing stories use sentient where they mean sapient. This one I assume they picked up from Star Trek. It's one of those words that is almost always used wrong whenever I've encountered it.

Your mileage may vary on this. I wouldn't get too hung up on it. If anything the market has shown it tolerates large numbers of people using these words wrong just fine. It's certainly not going to make or break your story.

Frostrunes said:

I am a purist. If they can breed together they're a race. If they can't, they're a species. Just because everyone's done it wrong for a long time isn't reason for me to not fix it. Whenever I see someone use race where they mean species I assume they picked it up from video games, personally.

Similarly I'm not a big fan of seeing stories use sentient where they mean sapient. This one I assume they picked up from Star Trek. It's one of those words that is almost always used wrong whenever I've encountered it.

Your mileage may vary on this. I wouldn't get too hung up on it. If anything the market has shown it tolerates large numbers of people using these words wrong just fine. It's certainly not going to make or break your story.

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Sapience refers to the ability to feel, which is possessed by most kinds of animals, on some level. Sentience refers to the ability to think, which is harder to define, since that exists more on a continuum. Traditionally, it's been used to refer to a human-level of self awareness or cognition, but evidence the presence of cognition of varying kinds in non human animals is far more accepted by science today than it once was. They do get sloppy with the use of the word sentient as interchangeable with sapient in SF.

The concept of races in biology isn't just about being able to breed together. It depends on the presence of specific alleles that are only found in that group. With humans, such haven't been shown to exist, though certain alleles are more common in some populations than others. The alleles that confer the traits we focus on as racial traits--skin color, hair texture, facial shape and so on--exist across human populations, and the differences are matters of their relative frequency and in how they combine with one another. Hair, skin, and eye color differences are things that probably evolved quite recently in humans.

Of course, there's a more general meaning of the term "race" in humans, which refers to a heritage and culture shared by a group of people. There's no reason why people living in a fantasy world, or in a space-faring future, wouldn't use the term in the same way. It's also possible for characters in a story to misuse terms in the same way many people do today.

Unless one is writing in omniscient, the terms used to refer to things would likely reflect the understanding and norms of the viewpoint character(s). I might have one character correct another if it's a word use that is one of my pet peeves, though, or if I think understanding could be important to the reader.

Frostrunes said:

I am a purist. If they can breed together they're a race. If they can't, they're a species. Just because everyone's done it wrong for a long time isn't reason for me to not fix it. Whenever I see someone use race where they mean species I assume they picked it up from video games, personally.

Similarly I'm not a big fan of seeing stories use sentient where they mean sapient. This one I assume they picked up from Star Trek. It's one of those words that is almost always used wrong whenever I've encountered it.

Your mileage may vary on this. I wouldn't get too hung up on it. If anything the market has shown it tolerates large numbers of people using these words wrong just fine. It's certainly not going to make or break your story.

Click to expand...

Sapience refers to the ability to feel, which is possessed by most kinds of animals, at at least some level. Sentience refers to the ability to think, which is harder to define, since thought exists more on a continuum. Traditionally, it's been used to refer to a human-level of self awareness or cognition, but evidence the presence of cognition of varying kinds in non human animals is far more accepted by science today than it once was. They do get sloppy with the use of the word sentient as interchangeable with sapient in SF.

The concept of races in biology isn't just about being able to breed together. It depends on the presence of specific alleles that are only found in that group. With humans, such haven't been shown to exist, though certain alleles are more common in some populations than others. The alleles that confer the traits we focus on as racial traits--skin color, hair texture, facial shape and so on--exist across human populations, and the differences are matters of their relative frequency and in how they combine with one another. Hair, skin, and eye color differences are things that probably evolved quite recently in humans.

Of course, there's a more general meaning of the term "race" in humans, which refers to a heritage and culture shared by a group of people. There's no reason why people living in a fantasy world, or in a space-faring future, wouldn't use the term in the same way. It's also possible for characters in a story to misuse terms in the same way many people do today.

Unless one is writing in omniscient, the terms used to refer to things would likely reflect the understanding and norms of the viewpoint character(s). I might have one character correct another if it's a word use that is one of my pet peeves, though, or if I think understanding could be important to the reader.

To make things more complicated, in your Standard Fantasy Setting, from Tolkien on down, humans and elves often can and do breed and produce viable offspring. Why this doesn't often extend to other races is never elaborated on and thinking about it too much probably involves TMI, but in many cases there tends to be a considerable size difference involved between the potential partners. Size and shape alone doesn't differentiate species though. A chihuaua and a great dane are both members of canis familiaris.

On top of that, in real life, DNA research suggests that we probably did interbreed with Neanderthals.

A lot of it depends on the tone and genre of what you're writing, too. "Race" would feel a lot more natural for fantasy worlds, regardless of whether the different groups can interbreed. "Species" feels more at home in SF. If you're looking for a good all-purpose generic term you can just call them different peoples, but admittedly that does sound a bit...bland?

I battled with this in my most recent SF WIP. In it, humanity has forked out into different "branches" that warrants the term speciation, but because it's not natural evolution, I didn't want to use that. And because the term 'race' is fairly laden for modern readers, I couldn't really figure out what to use. In the end, I cut all references and no one in the WIP describes what they actually are.

Biologically speaking, I guess the term should have been populations (ethnic group is not a biological term), although they could be considered different species, for they can't reproduce together -- but then again, two of the three branches no longer reproduce sexually, so it's a moot point to make.

themindstream said:

To make things more complicated, in your Standard Fantasy Setting, from Tolkien on down, humans and elves often can and do breed and produce viable offspring. Why this doesn't often extend to other races is never elaborated on and thinking about it too much probably involves TMI, but in many cases there tends to be a considerable size difference involved between the potential partners. Size and shape alone doesn't differentiate species though. A chihuaua and a great dane are both members of canis familiaris.

On top of that, in real life, DNA research suggests that we probably did interbreed with Neanderthals.

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Exactly. Members of distinct, but closely related, species can interbreed sometimes, even in nature. Sometimes this even results in new species. This is actually fairly common with plants, but it happens with animals sometimes too.

Neither of the traditional species "concepts" works in all situations. With regards to using morphology, there are examples of distinct species that are nearly indistinguishable (though they know the difference), and of course dogs vary greatly in size, shape, and even behavior (more than distinct species of wild canine tend to), but the different breeds interbreed with gusto. Domestication has relaxed selection, and living with humans has selected for dogs not being so picky about who they mate with, and for a much looser and more flexible social structure than is found in gray wolves.

Most of the modern dog breeds have only arisen as isolated and distinct entities in the past century or two, and the current trend in breeding (in the US kennel club, at least) is to select for greater and greater extremes, to the point of grotesqueness (imo), and to frown on any kind of outcrossing to re-introduce genetic diversity to a stock (the latter is a practice in many other domesticated animals). This is probably one reason why the dog breeds have gotten so extreme in appearance over the past century or so, in spite of relatively small genetic differences.

Looking at specific gene allele combinations to determine species can be useful, but again, some species are very similar genetically, in spite of looking different, and others are more different genetically than their appearance suggests.

The method favored by biologists today is to take a cladistic approach to classification. A species represents a single lineage, or a "twig" at the tip of a branch of the tree of life. As you go down the tree to different branching points (each representing the last common ancestor of every species "above it" on the tree), you are getting to relationships that are more and more distant. A single clade represents a common ancestor and all its descendant species. Clades can be huge or tiny (all life on Earth forms one clade if you go back to the first life form), but clades can never include some groups on a given branch without including the rest. The latter is why some traditional classification groups, like "apes," or "zebras," or even "reptiles" aren't considered to be "phyletic."

It's also why the odds of us finding an alien that looks like us, let alone can breed with us, is practically nil unless some hominins, or at least some kind of primate, were transplanted to an alien planet some time in the not-so-distant past.

Fantasy is another ball of wax, of course, as the concept of parallel worlds are then invoked. I'm inclined to think that elves and other humanoid fantasy races would be descendants of different hominin species from the same planet and they are, like Neanderthals, able to interbreed with us.

TSJohnson said:

I battled with this in my most recent SF WIP. In it, humanity has forked out into different "branches" that warrants the term speciation, but because it's not natural evolution, I didn't want to use that. And because the term 'race' is fairly laden for modern readers, I couldn't really figure out what to use. In the end, I cut all references and no one in the WIP describes what they actually are.

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I've heard the term 'clade' used in SF to describe this kind of offshoot. I will leave it to the life sciences experts in this thread to weigh in on if that is used accurately or not.

There was a show (and I can't remember when or where I've seen it) that took people from different ethnic backgrounds and got them to do a DNA test to determine their ancestry. The results were extremely surprising, as pretty much all of us are linked in some way, and even 'this' generation of people only had to go back a few generations to see that where they thought they had come from, was in fact, no so. One that surprised me was a Muslim man who had his origins traced down to the vikings. So really, I don't think there is a term as race, is there? Other than we are Homo Sapiens, that is. (now I wished I remembered the name of that show so I could link it...)

Kjbartolotta said:

I've heard the term 'clade' used in SF to describe this kind of offshoot. I will leave it to the life sciences experts in this thread to weigh in on if that is used accurately or not.

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Filing that away for possible future use; I'm writing multiverse/parallel world fantasy and there might be a point where that becomes a useful distinction.

konstantineblacke said:

There was a show (and I can't remember when or where I've seen it) that took people from different ethnic backgrounds and got them to do a DNA test to determine their ancestry. The results were extremely surprising, as pretty much all of us are linked in some way, and even 'this' generation of people only had to go back a few generations to see that where they thought they had come from, was in fact, no so. One that surprised me was a Muslim man who had his origins traced down to the vikings. So really, I don't think there is a term as race, is there? Other than we are Homo Sapiens, that is. (now I wished I remembered the name of that show so I could link it...)

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Biologically, no the idea of "race" as we use it has little meaningful distinction, but knowing a person's ancestry can be important, particularly in the medical field where groups of people from similar backgrounds may have genetic predisposition to various conditions. Some of these distinctions do run in population groups that more or less correspond to "racial" categories.

However, the social designations, ill-founded as they may be, aren't ignorable. The human tendency to separate people into "us" and "them" groups seems inescapable and the effects of that on society are real.

themindstream said:

Filing that away for possible future use; I'm writing multiverse/parallel world fantasy and there might be a point where that becomes a useful distinction.

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I got it from the Orion's Arm web setting, have seen it from time to time in published SF but surprised it hasn't become more of a staple. It's a very good term! Works well in SF, for fantasy I don't know so much.

Nature doesn't really care about our attempts at taxonomy.

Both the terms "Species" and "Race" are cultural. You tell me that pigs and jellyfish and orange trees can't cross breed, but that species cross exists in nature. (Just because it was "artificially" created by people doesn't really matter: We exist in nature and rely on natural laws to create genetic chimeras.)

Once we accept the idea that any distinguishing characteristics between species are more tribal than anything, even the difference between predator and prey species... Even here, one could not exist without the other. The prey relies upon the culling of the herd to survive and thrive; the predator makes the living matter of the prey physically part of its own body and again relies upon the prey to survive and thrive. Instead of calling them lion and gazelles, we could have culturally decided to name them as part of the same "species" of ecological network, wherein relationships are more important than individuals.

This is a long and rambly effort to suggest that the third option exists by taking off our own cultural blinders and reinventing the language of life, itself, and how we look upon life.

We are a "tribal species", and our taxonomic efforts seem to impose our own tribal mindset upon animals and plants and fungi that do not share that mindset.