Why do you find it easy to believe in genetic advantages for basketball, but not other activities? It would be strange if other talent did NOT have a genetic (a

Why do you find it easy to believe in genetic advantages for basketball, but not other activities? It would be strange if other talent did NOT have a genetic (and maybe hormonal, etc.) component, wouldn't it, when most everything from intelligence to obesity can be inherited? Exceptional aptitude only makes sense measured against the median performance. So yes, of course you'd observe or otherwise measure the subject somehow. But from there, if you come up with some concrete measure of ability (easier in some fields than others), you can work backwards to try to identify and isolate biological and environmental components. Some random examples from a quick google: chess correlations with different intelligences (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289616301593 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...), genetic factors helping chess and science ability (https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4425/14/1/204 https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4425/14/1/204), music and genes plus practice (https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-014-0671-9 https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-014-0671-9). There is a much bigger discussion on this exact topic here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10519-009-9260-5 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10519-009-9260-5 Or a Wikipedia summary of an opposing viewpoint, that talent is NOT involved at all, only practice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Practice_(learning_method)#Deliberate_practice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Practice_(learning_method)#Del... TLDR aptitude at something is usually a combination of many things, from genes to hormones to upbringing to deliberate practice. Yes, we have vague concepts like "talent" and "intelligence" that are often hard to nail down, and used lazily in day-to-day life to mean whatever the speakers wants it to mean. But you can still reframe it in a more precise way, like "Is ability at X activity partially heritable/genetic?" or "Given a group of people practicing Y similarly for Z duration, do they arrive at roughly similar outcomes?" There's nothing mystical about any of this. It's the same sort of work as trying to trace the genetic components of anything we experience, whether that's aptitude or disease or personality or behavior. At the extreme ends, it's easy to see this across species; why are some so much faster, or able to solve certain kinds of problems, or can navigate by starlight, or can sleep half-awake, whatever. I think the counter view -- that humans alone, of all the animals, are created absolutely equal and environment alone shapes our outcomes -- is far more mystical. That requires the belief that the brain and mind is some sort of super-natural device not subject to normal biological evolution, replication mistakes, natural selection, etc. If talent didn't have a biological component, we should be able to train everything from apes to whales to do exactly what we do, given enough practice.