Perhaps you should divulge your own personal training and racing performance history. It could help to illuminate why you are taking this absurd position.
Your original post variously mentions a 4:20 mile (or 1600m?) and 17 minute 5k. These are already wildly disproportionate, especially in trained runners. I would say as a general rule many more people can hope to reach a 17min 5k than a 4:20 mile.
I trained a lot in high school, and did pretty well for myself that way. Got up to 70-90mpw for my last two years, doubling, training under a highly respected and successful coach in my state. I ran around 16 flat XC, 9:50 3200m, 4:30ish (not under, ha). I was two years younger than 'normal' for my grade, so I regarded this as pretty good. But I was severely limited by running 2:06 in the 800 at best, and not being able to break 58 in a 4x4. I know you may be prepared to disregard my experience from this last admission, and simply allege that I wasn't training for speed appropriately. You can say that if you want. But if you've ever been around high school track and field, you'll just notice that kids show up at vastly different speed levels. Usually everyone can improve. But kids who show up under 54 have a much better chance of getting to 50 than kids who show up at 60. You can try to say that all the kids who arrive with decent speed have a soccer background, or some other extenuating factors. Sometimes this is true, but in my experience, at some point against all the empirical data its just not a tenable hypothesis. Differences in early athletic background assuredly account for some small portion of differences in high school running performance; but it's just not sensible to allege that most of the discrepancy between sub 4:20 kids and everyone else is a 'highly active childhood background'. Typically that's just something that those of us who want to believe we can catch up with hard work say.
Anyways, as the other thing I'll add from my experience, you can only train so much. I did well for my age, but there were still kids beating me investing half, or a quarter, or less of the training time. If and when any of those kids decided to become remotely serious, they would leave me behind quickly.
Anyways, you seem to have in the thread admitted the existence of 'talent', and the precise question of the thread seems to be whether or not a 4:20 1600m is basically achievable for half of the (able-bodied, male, young, etc) population. The answer is almost certainly no, and definitely no in any meaningful sense. Those of us who got stuck around 4:30 or 4:40 in highschool, after four good years of training, a good portion of us could probably make it to 4:20 if we had another 10 years to commit everything to it. But it is simply not materially possible for the majority of people, let alone sensible, to put your adult life on hold so that you can maybe run 4:20 at age 25. So anyways, I think the meaningful question really ends up being about how many can hope to run around 4:20 after a couple years of meaningful training (so for most people, in highschool). The answer of course is way more than do, because not everyone with the ability commits to the training. But it's still a very small proportion.
Also as others have noted, there's a severe selection bias in these things; kids who start slow don't typically put in the work bc of the way various reward mechanisms work. But they're mostly right not too - its a lot of work just to most likely lose to the more talented kids doing a similar proportion of training.
