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MrMind comments on Stupid Questions, 2nd half of December - Less Wrong Discussion
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I don't think this is a stupid question, but everyone else seems to—that is, the immediate reaction to it is usually "there's obviously no difference." I've struggled with this question a lot, and the commonly accepted answer just doesn't sit well with me.
If different races have different skin, muscle/bone structure, genetics, and maybe other things, shouldn't it follow that different races could have different brains, too?
I know this is taboo, and feel the following sort of disclaimer is obligatory: I'm not racist, nor do I think any difference would necessarily be something drastic or significant, but the existence of a difference is something that seems probable to me.
Edit: Though it's obviously included, I'm not talking specifically about intelligence!
No, not really. That doesn't mean that they don't, anyway, it's just that it doesn't follow from the premise.
We do not know much about individual variability of the genome, and as such we do not know much about what parts of the DNA are affected by individual (a posteriori, ethnic) differences.
A recent experiment, for example, showed that there is more DNA variability within a single ethnic group (subsaharians, probably the most ancient alive today) than within different other ethnic groups.
This depends on how you structure the argument. It is a strong response to "races cannot vary in brains" to say "what generates that fact that would not also generate the fact that races cannot vary in skin, muscle/bone structure, genetics, and maybe other things?", because this is pointing out that the claim that races have identical brains needs complicating features, or else it gets other questions obviously wrong.
What do you mean by 'individual variability of the genome"? You know that we can actually sequence human genomes, right? And that this has been done for people of many different racial groups, and we've identified the areas that people vary, so that you can get your SNPs sequenced and your racial ancestry estimated cheaply?
This is entirely unrelated to the question at hand, and you seem deeply mistaken about its relevance. (If this is true, and it is, doesn't this mean it's obvious that we can tell apart the ethnicities by looking at their DNA?)
I've discovered just now that the original question was "... could have different brains..." instead of "... have different brains..."
That said, the answer is: of course.