Not sure why the German race dying out would be "the demographic armageddon of Western Civilisation", but I guess that's just me.

On it's own it won't be, but it's part of a larger trend.

Anyway, who cares? - I sure don't. Oh, yeah - you're the one who said Germany will still exist in a thousand years..

Damn you've got a good memory.

Anyway, Germany WILL still exist in a thousand years (nothing special about that figure, btw, I just plucked it out of thin air). The German race will die out only if something fairly drastic isn't done to reverse current trends. But something will be, we all know what Germans are like. Just because you're pretty sure that the fire brigade is going to come and put out a fire, is not a reason not to yell "fire!" in the first place. That's what makes them come!

Some critics believe that these ambiguities render the very notion of race worthless. I disagree. The physical topography of our world cannot be accurately described in words. To navigate it, you need a map with elevations, contour lines and reference grids. But it is hard to talk in numbers, and so we give the world's more prominent features—the mountain ranges and plateaus and plains—names. We do so despite the inherent ambiguity of words. The Pennines of northern England are about one-tenth as high and long as the Himalayas, yet both are intelligibly described as mountain ranges.

So, too, it is with the genetic topography of our species. The billion or so of the world's people of largely European descent have a set of genetic variants in common that are collectively rare in everyone else; they are a race. At a smaller scale, three million Basques do as well; so they are a race as well. Race is merely a shorthand that enables us to speak sensibly, though with no great precision, about genetic rather than cultural or political differences.

But it is a shorthand that seems to be needed. One of the more painful spectacles of modern science is that of human geneticists piously disavowing the existence of races even as they investigate the genetic relationships between "ethnic groups." Given the problematic, even vicious, history of the word "race," the use of euphemisms is understandable. But it hardly aids understanding, for the term "ethnic group" conflates all the possible ways in which people differ from each other.

You know they are, you just don't like the word "race" because it has bad vibes. If I'd said "ethnic Germans" or something, you wouldn't have batted an eyelid.

So then, French are a race, and Danes are a race, and Bulgarians are a race, and let's not forget the race of Luxemburg. Thanks for clearing that up.

But sparrows are a species, not a race. A species is distinct in that members cannot mate outside the species and have fertile offspring. Birds are an order. There is no order to your thought here.

It was just an analogy for crying out loud. The Iberian peninsula isn't a species of animal either, is it?

what about the idea that a chicken is just the egg's way to create another chicken.

Perhaps it means that chickens should value their eggs a bit more? And humans their genetic inheritence? At any rate, they should stop consulting the fox about how to run the henhouse.

If preservation of the variety of the genepool is desired, that can be done without preserving every sub-sub-class. Just mix the genes into a surviving population.

This is part of what the Leroi-link addressed. Lewontin's fallacy is that he only considers genes at an individual level when contemplating the idea of "race", when race is more properly thought of as a set of genes that correlate with each other and appear in certain combinations. If you mix the genes into the surviving population the genes are split up and that unique combination is lost. Also, Germans aren't mixing that much, they're just not having kids (or not enough) so the genes are just plain dying out.

With all your talk of the white race, why do I get this feeling that a computer geek like you probably dates mostly Asian women?

LOL! Because that's my privelage!