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Interesting piece in The Wall Street Journal, which could have been cribbed from David Epstein’s The Sports Gene (a very good book I might add), NBA Basketball Runs in the Family (if you go to Google News and search for the title it should come up and you can get a free copy):
According to a Wall Street Journal analysis of biographical data on every NBA player, 48.8% are related to current or former elite athletes—defined as anyone who has played a sport professionally, in the NCAA or at national-team level. While other leagues feature notable dynasties—the Manning’s of the NFL or the Griffey’s in baseball—only about 17.5% of NFL players and 14.5% of MLB players are related to other elite athletes, based on a similar study.
The connectedness in the NBA likely comes down to the importance of height in elite basketball. The average NBA player is about 6-feet, 6-inches tall, which is 11 inches taller than the average American male, according to Census data.
As indicated in the piece you aren’t seeing that the 10,000 hour rule is a secret passed down within families. If you are not very tall it is unlikely that 10,000 hours of practice will result in you becoming a professional athlete in the NBA. The article emphasizes that the enrichment of those with relatives who had played in the NBA is far greater than the NFL or MLB, but please note that the average person’s odds of entering any professional sport is infinitesimal. Well, not quite, but the odds are low.
The piece in The Wall Street Journal is valuable for the added data, but there a few conceptual aspects which I’m not satisfied with. Researchers have known for decades that most of the variation in the population in non-malnourished societies in height is due to variation in genetics. 80 percent heritability is conservative. This can lead to some confused intuitions though. The correlation between siblings is high, but not that high, in the range of ~0.50. That translates to an average difference in height of nearly two inches.
In other words, parental or sibling success in the NBA is not destiny. On the contrary. Nearly half of current players may have had relatives who played in the NBA, but most of the people who have relatives who played in the NBA did not themselves play in the NBA. But, obviously having relatives is incredibly predictive of much higher than normal odds (orders of magnitude greater!) of becoming a professional.
Why? As noted in the article NBA players need to have an intersection of traits which are very deviated from the norm. The range restriction on height, with “very short” players being mildly above average the human male median, shrinks the pool of potential candidates a lot. Fourteen years ago James F. Crow wrote Unequal by Nature: A geneticist’s perspective on human differences. Crow observes “that whenever a society singles out individuals who are outstanding or unusual in any way, the statistical contrast between means and extremes comes to the fore.” As it happens being a professional basketball player is not just about height; one needs to also be athletic, and exhibit a modicum of agility and skill. At the collegiate level there are many relatively tall players, but most of them do not have the skill level of an NBA player. The best-of-the-best have often been NBA players who combine great height with high skill levels (e.g., Lebron James, Magic Johnson, and Kevin Garnett being examples; Michael Jordan, a few inches shorter than James, had greater skill, but he is close to the NBA median).
The article also highlights the fact that individual humans often want to attribute their own success to their hard work, or choices their parents made. Many of the players interviewed did not deny the importance of their size and athletic endowments, but emphasized the importance of learned work ethic and competition with family members of similar skill levels and physique. This illustrates two other aspects of quantitative genetics: gene-environment interaction and gene-environment correlation. Obviously these are real phenomena. But are they really relevant for an NBA player?
David Robinson grew up in a middle class family (his father was an engineer). He scored 1320 on the pre-recentered SAT (that puts his IQ well above two standard deviations) and majored in mathematics at the Naval Academy. Robinson’s non-basketball activities were, and are, copious (and not in a Dennis Rodman fashion).
He was not initially very good at basketball in secondary school, but underwent a massive growth spurt in his late teens. Eventually he became a standout basketball player at the collegiate level, and went on to a storied career (after serving some time in the navy). My point with recounting this is that even someone like David Robinson, who had many alternative paths, talents, and opportunities, and evinced no burning desire to become a basketball player at all costs, became a professional. Why? Because his raw talent was clear, and the reality is that becoming a professional basketball players is highly lucrative. The average NBA player earns millions. Even a washout player can earn millions in one year.
So we are at this point moving from the domain of quantitative genetics, to economics. Incentives matter. Millions of young people delude themselves into thinking they have a chance. The reality is that even someone like Jeff Hornacek, perhaps a mascot for those who argue that work ethic can match talent, is not physically typical (he’s 6’4). And, let’s be honest, work ethic matters a lot, but it too is heritable (mediated through conscientiousness). Wheels within wheels….
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I think that the high genetic bias in basketball can also be a consequence of the inter-related issue of the use of performance enhancing drugs and doping in elite sports.
Unless you start using as a child, drugs can never make you taller. But they can easily make you stronger, and faster, and more agile, and increase your endurance, and increase concentration and drive.
Many would like to believe that all the professional atheletes have been clean except for a few well known cases, but that is completely and totally wrong. This was especially true before testing became so comprehensive and regular.
There is no way to know what drugs were being used by atheletes in the past. The olympics didn’t even test for anything before 1968, and all the tests have been spotty and well behind advancements in drug technology until… actually that is still true today.
With height at high end and 50% of my first and second degree relatives as professional athletes in China, there is price to pay genetically.
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34515952
You gain something and you lose something.
Its like the coach said: “You can’t teach them how to be 7 feet tall.”
While genetics clearly plays a part, don’t count out other factors.
If you look collectively at all professions with an extraordinarily high fraction of people following in relatives footsteps (e.g. politics, acting, military service as a senior officer) you see a distinct pattern:
To reach the highest levels you have to spend many years toiling in circumstances with meager rewards and recognition, where anyone qualified enough to reach those levels could easily have found a more comfortable lifestyle doing something else.
For example, you can’t become a general in the Army without first becoming a Colonel, Lt. Colonel, Major, etc. all at pay far less than someone with comparable managerial responsibilities and talents could receive in the private sector. Unless you have someone at the top levels of the military profession to serve as a role model and an ideological commitment to pursuing that kind of career, you will take those alternatives.
Now, of all the careers one could have in sports, I think it is fair to say that few have a larger genetic component than NBA basketball. But, even there, having the role model to illustrate that this is a viable path to consider does make a difference in whether people will decide to stick it out.
In contrast, in a field like law, many top performers start receiving lavish salaries the first year out of law school. And, in fields like investment banking and management consulting the lavish salaries can start the first year out of undergrad. In those professions, over the past several decades, impact of having relatives in the field or even a social class background that provides an edge has declined greatly.
Thanks for the link to the Crow paper. That looks like a good resource for introducing genetics/heritability to those who might be troubled by the inequality/race implications.
Is it just me or is the last paragraph a rather dramatic step beyond the rest of the paper with respect to its (unstated) implications?
Do you mean something precise when you say that heritability in work ethic is “mediated through conscientiousness”? E.g. some study shows that heritability in work ethic disappears once conscientiousness is accounted for? Or is just a hypothesis of yours?
“The average NBA player is about 6-feet, 6-inches tall, which is 11 inches taller than the average American male, according to Census data.”
The average adult American male is 5 foot 10. That’s not an 11 inch difference between someone who is 6 foot 6.
It’s funny you mention Dennis Rodman as a foil to David Robison since The Sports Gene notes that Rodman was 5’9″ when he graduated high school (arguably below average adult male height) and had never played competitively other than warming the bench on his high school team for half a season. Not only did he grow 11 inches in 2 years after high school but he became more athletic and coordinated without any significant action on his part. Rodman: “It was like I had a new body that knew how to do all this shit the old one didn’t.”
Meanwhile I have played basketball ~2 hrs. a week every week for the past 8 years, which comes out to around 800 hours. Certainly not 10,000, but it shows my innate level of talent that any washed up athlete who was good enough for his high school team could easily wipe the court with me.
Related to someone who has played an NCAA sport? First off, that brings in an extraordinary number of people. There are at least 250 Div. 1 colleges, and surely they average 200+ athletes, so the currently active cohort has to be half a million. How did they measure this? Asking the pro athlete?
If the measurement were genuine, I can’t believe the percentage isn’t higher.
More substantively, I’d suggest that in looking at the difference between basketball, football and baseball, it’s more telling and relevant to think about the lower percentages of the latter two, which suggest that genetics is not all that predictive of athletic talent unless the question is something so simplistic as height.
And, this is why I’ve never thought much of the NBA. Consider Scottie Pippen – at a mere 6’1″ he couldn’t even make the team at his directional school. At 6’7″ he’s a superstar. Basketball has almost nothing to do with athletics.
1) range constriction
2) it's just false that all 6'7 males are equivalent in athleticism. most of them lack the grace and robustness of most NBA players
If the measurement were genuine, I can't believe the percentage isn't higher.
More substantively, I'd suggest that in looking at the difference between basketball, football and baseball, it's more telling and relevant to think about the lower percentages of the latter two, which suggest that genetics is not all that predictive of athletic talent unless the question is something so simplistic as height.
And, this is why I've never thought much of the NBA. Consider Scottie Pippen - at a mere 6'1" he couldn't even make the team at his directional school. At 6'7" he's a superstar. Basketball has almost nothing to do with athletics.Replies: @Razib Khan
And, this is why I’ve never thought much of the NBA. Consider Scottie Pippen – at a mere 6’1″ he couldn’t even make the team at his directional school. At 6’7″ he’s a superstar. Basketball has almost nothing to do with athletics.
1) range constriction
2) it’s just false that all 6’7 males are equivalent in athleticism. most of them lack the grace and robustness of most NBA players
One thing about basketball that isn’t discussed much is the mental skill needed for certain aspects of the game. I believe rebounding is one of those skills. A good rebounder has a natural instinct for where the ball is going to come of the rim or back board. They are often moving to that location while everyone else is standing around unsure of where it is going to go. Their mind seems to process the trajectory of the ball in relation to the rim much faster.
In contrast, I was a pretty good shotblocker even though I can't jump and have relatively short arms. I think shot blocking must be the easiest part of basketball. If some giant shows up in American basketball from some country where they don't play much basketball (e.g., Manute Bol or Hakeem Olajuwon in the 1980s), usually the one thing he's good at initially is blocking shots.
In contrast, Rodman, who was kind of an evil genius of basketball, winning five NBA championships, never averaged even 1.0 blocked shots per game in his career. But he was a two time NBA Defensive Player of the Year, because he was so effective at denying his man the ball and other defensive skills more subtle than blocking shots.
Extending Howard Gardener’s theory of “multiple intelligences” it does not seem too far fetched to talk of “Basketball IQ”. That is there is a pattern or limited number of patterns of genes which bestow the highest adaptive advantage to the environment of Professional Basketball”
Radical environmentalism seems to fit the American Character, even before it was accepted as legal dogma in “Brown vs the Board”.
I think it fair to state that for most of history the heritability of traits was a given, So IIRC guilds tended to restrict marriage to other guild members, and of course so did the aristocracy. These of course are specific examples in humans of homogamy. Which is also of course in the USA is also incorrect.
I’m 6’4″ but was the world’s worst rebounder. I never had the slightest clue where a shot would bounce. Dennis Rodman could usually guess which direction the rebound would carom as soon as the ball left the shooter’s fingertips.
In contrast, I was a pretty good shotblocker even though I can’t jump and have relatively short arms. I think shot blocking must be the easiest part of basketball. If some giant shows up in American basketball from some country where they don’t play much basketball (e.g., Manute Bol or Hakeem Olajuwon in the 1980s), usually the one thing he’s good at initially is blocking shots.
In contrast, Rodman, who was kind of an evil genius of basketball, winning five NBA championships, never averaged even 1.0 blocked shots per game in his career. But he was a two time NBA Defensive Player of the Year, because he was so effective at denying his man the ball and other defensive skills more subtle than blocking shots.