"Humans do not have biological race" is correct if and only if you change the definition of "race" to whatever definition these academics have made up expressly to make the statement true.
If you use any definition that wasn't specifically concocted to make the statement true (i.e. any definition used by normal people or by actual scientists doing real work, say prior to 1990), it remains false.
Yeah, I agree that's what's probably going on here. Being nincompoops, they've likely redefined "biological race" to mean something tautological, like this:
> biological race is a collection of N genes that clearly separate all races; no such set of genes exists, therefore biological race doesn't exist.
Academics love this kind of stuff. The danger is that this up-is-down wordplay works its way into things that actually matter. Then it's (quite literally) Orwellian. I guarantee that the panel of clerics at Nature won't be so precise in their application of the funhouse rules when it's in their ideological interest to ignore them.
What is the implication here, that geneticists decided in 1990 to pack in "real work" in order to work up a grand conspiracy to wipe out an entire concept?
I think if you were doing scientific work in this area, you would want political cover.
"I'm just studying why people whose ancestors grew up in one area are more likely to have a certain gene than people whose ancestors grew up in a different area. It has absolutely nothing to do with race".
No, I'm just guessing that the inflection point of productive scientists being financially displaced by useless academia career optimizers was some time in the last few decades.
If you use any definition that wasn't specifically concocted to make the statement true (i.e. any definition used by normal people or by actual scientists doing real work, say prior to 1990), it remains false.