Do you believe there is such a thing as a maladaptive human trait? Your argument seems to apply equally to every trait.
To answer your question: I consider it to be (at least partly) maladaptive because it leads to increased death by disease.
I’m not sure what your point is here. Are you saying that resisting to touch your face for fear of catching disease changes your genes? That learned behaviors can be passed on genetically?
I think his point is that young healthy people don’t die from disease as often. It’s mostly older people who die. Since older people have already passed their genes on, behaviors that increase infection have less of an impact on evolutionary fitness than might at first be assumed.
I do not believe there is such a thing as a “maladaptive” trait, in an evolutionary sense. Adaptation is the process process whereby a trait becomes fixed in a population because individuals possessing that trait have a greater tendency to survive and reproduce in a given environment than those without said trait. The frequency of the genes responsible for that trait in a population reach 100%; that simply cannot happen if the trait is deleterious.
But it requires more than to “lead to increased death” for a trait to be selected against. Driving leads to increased death by auto accident. Smoking leads to increased death by cancer. Running with the bulls leads to increased death by trampling. Lots of behaviors lead to increased death as a consequence of those behaviors. That in and of itself, doesn’t mean anything.
In order for a trait to be selected against, it has to actively prevent, or reduce the probability of, individuals possessing it from reproducing. And it has to be heritable.
In this case, there is no “face touching” gene, or combination of genes. It is not even a discrete trait unto itself that can be singled out; there is no genetic variation that can selected for or against (and really, that’s what selection is about: it acts upon certain variants of traits, not entire traits unto themselves, excepting cases of extreme change in the environment).
Further, given that there are six billion of us who touch our faces, it clearly has not prevented the majority of individuals from reproducing. I doubt you could even say it’s prevented anyone from reproducing - how many pre-reproduction deaths would you say could have been completely prevented but for touching one’s face?
The one you mentioned in your post on Dawkins: evolution.
To piggyback Darwin’s Finch’s excellent response:
Death by disease isn’t a problem. Infections from face-touching don’t kill/sterililze enough humans to make a difference evolutionarily, and they certainly don’t kill/sterilize enough humans early enough (i.e. before reproductive age).
Keep in mind that evolution doesn’t “care” about an organism having a long life. Evolution does not “strive” for perfection. Rather, it “gropes” blindly – very much blindly and purposelessly. Any “successes” are pure luck. A great many of evolution’s “failures” are truly maladaptive, and lead to extinction. Many other evolutionary “failures” may be less than ideal from the viewpoint of the organism, but said organism carries on and reproduces in numbers anyhow. And all that counts is ability to reproduce and multiply.
For all that has been said, there is too much oversimplification going on.
Evolution and natural selection only exist in THE PAST. If you look back on everything that has happened, that is evolution. It doesn’t exist in the future, nor even in the present.
How’d everything shake out? That is evolution. “It’s” not driving anything anywhere.
Whatever happens, well, happens…however it all shakes out…and whatever we are left with right now is the result of natural selection. The environment could suddenly change and all the traits and characteristics that led to a species living and reproducing in great numbers for many hundreds of thousands of years could suddenly lead to declining numbers over thousands of years. We look BACK and call that evolution…natural selection.
Evolution doesn’t “do” anything. It is not a process, or mechanism. All that exist are consequences. Eyes have no purpose…only consequences. All traits are purposeless. They only have consequences.
Man could destroy the Horseshoe crab population through over fishing and pollution, even though they are about as ‘adapted’ as you could get, being they date back millions of years. BAM! When that happens, we call it ‘evolution’.
False: natural selection happens in THE NOW. Indeed, it can only exist in the present. Individuals are selected for or against (or not at all) based on their current traits in the current environment.
It’s not a matter of him being unreliable; it’s a matter of their being more reliable scientists to choose from. Dawkins is an ethologist by trade. That he has become the public face of evolutionary biology probably has more to do with his outspokenness against creationism than any actual contributions to the field (most of which are centered towards answering questions in his field, rather than general problems in evolution); you will rarely find Dawkins cited in journals on evolution.
I do not agree with many of Dawkins’ ideas on the workings of evolution. Therefore, what is good enough for him is absolutely not good enough for me. Gould, Mayr, Futuyma, Eldredge, Meyers, etc. are all more “reliable”, in my opinion.
Back to the OP:
As infants, we have a POWERFUL suckle instinct. (In fact, one test for it is to put gentle pressure against said infant’s cheek to see if it’d turn it’s face towards the pressure.)
Lots of us didn’t grow out of that “put stuff in mouth to see what it’s like” phase until we were, like, five. And even then quite a few of us kept doing it where Mom and Dad couldn’t tell us to Stop That, It’s Gross. (I, for one, was sucking my thumb until I was somewhere around 7 years old and my left thumb is noticeably skinner than my right as a result.)
So as grownups, our subconscious mind is still comforted by having our hands near (or in) our mouths.
As Freud might say, it’s the latent bits of our Oral phase that we didn’t quite push out of the Id.
I guess the point I am driving home is that you can’t make an observation in the present. You really don’t know how what you observe will shake out. You can only look back.