To creative Chaos
Sure I do use race and species differently. Race has the definition I wrote above and then you cannot know if two different animals are from different races just looking at them. To be sure you have to go through the gene analyses.
To me one can make the difference between two species thanks to the different appearances or shapes or living habits two different things (not only living animals) have. Thus basicaly species are based on forms and races on gene analyses. Even though it is told that two different species cannot reproduce.
And you are right, that's not because two species are close by their genes that they can produce offsprings.
What brings us to the rather difficult question of the link between the form of a given animal and his genes.
To be very quick genes have meanings and orders, there are "master genes" and "slave genes"... and so on.
For example both flies and humans have a gene that says "eye". If you remove the eye gene of a fly, it will not have eyes anymore. Then if you take the human gene for eye and insert it into that fly. Then the fly will have eyes again... but still fly eyes, not human ones. Which means there are slave genes that built the eye following what the fly needs.
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