What leads you to this conclusion? I am not a natural athlete nor a gifted writer, but I don't find one to be significantly less challenging than the other.
I'm not an evolutionary biologist, but it seems to me we've been running around hunting for a lot longer than we've been sitting around writing (/ doing math / other mainly intellectual activity), and thus one is significantly more natural than the other given our history. The human body seems designed to throw spears / rocks / balls. The necessary mental faculties for writing a poem seem more complicated than those needed for doing sports. The proportion of good athletes to good writers.
I'd love to be corrected on this if the opposite is true, that becoming a good athlete is just as difficult as or more difficult than becoming a good writer. I'm just not seeing it.
Writing is just another form of communication. Be it grunting noises, speech, or song, it has been in development for a very, very long time.
I won't comment on the difficulty of becoming a good athlete to that of being a good writer because it really is like comparing apples to oranges. That being said, becoming a good athlete can be incredibly tough both physically, and mentally.
Take a relatively simple sport like running. You will find a huge variation in the efficiency of joggers, even though it is a "natural" motion for the body. This is not even taking into account training, or nutrition. In fact, there are actually people who study the science of running:
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What leads you to this conclusion? I am not a natural athlete nor a gifted writer, but I don't find one to be significantly less challenging than the other.
I'm not an evolutionary biologist, but it seems to me we've been running around hunting for a lot longer than we've been sitting around writing (/ doing math / other mainly intellectual activity), and thus one is significantly more natural than the other given our history. The human body seems designed to throw spears / rocks / balls. The necessary mental faculties for writing a poem seem more complicated than those needed for doing sports. The proportion of good athletes to good writers.
I'd love to be corrected on this if the opposite is true, that becoming a good athlete is just as difficult as or more difficult than becoming a good writer. I'm just not seeing it.
Writing is just another form of communication. Be it grunting noises, speech, or song, it has been in development for a very, very long time.
I won't comment on the difficulty of becoming a good athlete to that of being a good writer because it really is like comparing apples to oranges. That being said, becoming a good athlete can be incredibly tough both physically, and mentally.
Take a relatively simple sport like running. You will find a huge variation in the efficiency of joggers, even though it is a "natural" motion for the body. This is not even taking into account training, or nutrition. In fact, there are actually people who study the science of running:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrOgDCZ4GUo