SHOULD THE TERM "RACE" BE ABANDONED?

The immediate reaction of most people is that this question is obviously nonsense. The physician will retort, "What do you mean 'there is no such thing as race'? I see it in my practice everyday!" Jane Doe and John Doe will be equally incredulous. There is no "biological entity that warrants the term 'race'." (Noble, 1990)
But all of this needs explaining. First, it is perfectly true that the long-term residents of the various parts of the world have patterns of features that we can easily identify as characteristic of the areas from which they come. It should be added that they have to have resided in those places for a couple of hundred thousand years before their regional patterns became established. Well, you may ask, why can't we call those regional patterns "races"? In fact, we can and do, but it does not make them coherent biological entities. "Races" defined in such a way are products of our perceptions. (Noble, 1990) "Seeing is believing" will be the retort, and, after all, aren't we seeing reality in those regional differences?
I should point out that this is the same argument that was made against Copernicus and Galile...