The threshold for an NBA player is 6'1" (Wikipedia actually lists lower range for Guards at 6'0 but I'm going to ignore that) or 73".

http://books.google.com/books?id=nmQ...um=1&ct=result

The average male height in America is 69.5" with a standard deviation of about 2.00". The threshold for an NBA player is less than 2 standard deviations from the mean! 4% of the US population is over 6'1" and only 435 players are active in the NBA. Mind you, those are total players drawn from outside the US as well, meaning the number of Americans is even less; regardless, for simplicity you have 435 players drawn from a population of 12,000,000 (assuming 45% males) giving 5.4 million people to draw from.

435/5.4 million is 8.05E-5. This is sorted by height, which is easily measured. What other genes do you think it takes? Do you think these genes are that rare? Or is it coincidence that most American NBA players share similar backgrounds (lower middle class or upper lower class, started at an early age, played pick-up, joined church or rec leagues young, played in highschool, invited to various coaching clinics and camps as recruits, played in college.) Basketball, unlike other sports (baseball most notably in America, hockey in Canada), is a year-round sport that can be played just about anywhere, so it doesn't have as pronounced a cut-off age.

These players were sorted and selected from very young age, before any sort of talent was able to manifest. Nobody is born making free throws, but when you're bigger than the other kids and get the play more, you get more practice. When you get more practice, you get better. When you get better, you get invited to play more with better competition. You get more practice because you now play with your first team and your competition team. The extra practice continues giving you an edge and then you get to high school where a college scout sees you (with the practice-earned edge) and invites you to his school's camp. You go to his camp and get better, the next year a couple more scouts invite you. Before you know it, you're invited to play with the best of the best and none of it ever had to do with some God-given ability to judge your wrist-release. It had to do with the fact that you started playing more than your friends, so you stood out just a little bit. That stand out brought you more practice, so your edge got a little bigger. By the time you're a pro, you're fully-grown 6'3" and playing point guard.

10,000 hours of practice. That's the magic number. If you're good enough to get started on the road to 10,000 hours of practice, your God-given "talents" don't matter.

Gladwell's book is actually more about how society selects the people who can be successful by receiving 10,000 hours of practice, which is largely not merit-based. Bill Gates, for example, happened to go to a high school that had a remote terminal in the 60s before most Universities had them. Bill Joy happened to go to University of Michigan which had a modern mainframe and also had a loophole in its code to allow unlimited computing time. Most of the major Jewish law firms in New York began because traditional old row white law firms would not hire Jews and would not litigate hostile takeovers in the 50s and 60s. The Jews were willing to take any case that came before them and when hostile takeovers because popular in the 70s, the traditional firms didn't have the expertise the Jews did (there were a few other interesting effects that Jewish ethnicity had.) The Beatles were invited to play in Hamburg by a promoter who used them as 8-hour-a-night shows for weeks at a time because the promoter needed someone to play in a pinch. Steve Jobs had a similar story. Mozart began writing symphonies at age 7 but it wasn't till his 20s (say... 10,000 hours later) that he wrote any symphonies of note.

If genetics were so important, why isn't everyone on Forbes' Wealthiest list also in MENSA? Why isn't MENSA dominating every field they can touch? Success is like an amusement park ride: if you aren't 54" tall, you have no chance of having fun on the ride. If you're over 54" tall, there is no guarantee you'll like it, but at least you have a shot at it. Being 54.5" doesn't have any better odds of enjoyment than being 72".