Dr. Zizmor doesn’t read much.

“Dr. Z.” is the dermatologist with signs all over New York subways. You can tell he’s not much for the printed page because of all the typos in his signs. “Scaring” for scarring, break out in one place and then breakout in another, and so on. Okay, he probably didn’t compose the text himself, but he presumably approved it.

No, Dr. Z. is no reader. Not catching things like scaring on his own sign suggests someone who does not spend his life immersed in print. He likely prefers talking to reading, and in that, he is like most human beings.

Reading is a highly artificial activity. If human language had existed for 24 hours, writing only came along at about 11:15 p.m., just 6,000 years ago. And widespread literacy as a norm is only a few centuries old.

We are genetically programmed to talk, not to read, which in fact wears out our eyes. Plus humans are social animals, while reading is solitary. Reading Is Fundamental, the slogan went in the 1970s. Interesting, given that reading is also unnatural.

There was a time when more people were inclined to it anyway. Look at photos from the 1950s of men commuting to New York, with hats on — and reading newspapers. Almost to a man. It wasn’t that Americans were any more intellectual then than they are now. It was simply that there was nothing to do on the train but read.

Technology has changed that. Today, a photo of the equivalent people would reveal as many iPods as newspapers, and in trains running above ground, about every third person would be on their cell phones. Next time you’re riding the subway, take a look at how few people who are alone have books, magazines, or newspapers anymore.

I’m not sure what the value would be of condemning this as signs of a society descending into semi-literate barbarism. After all, who is to say how much those 1960s commuters were retaining from what they read anyway? Reading is unnatural.

But cell phones indeed portend a transformation that I anticipate with dread: when it becomes permissible to talk on the phone in airplanes.

It happened on trains long ago. I recall my first up-close encounter with cell phones on an Amtrak trip in 1999, when the person next to me was on and off of her “cellular phone” talking to co-workers. She was nice; I remember us exchanging cards at the end of the ride.

It occurred to me, though, that train travel was now transformed — listening to people talk on the phone endlessly over hours’ long trips was now unavoidable. On Amtrak’s Acela, one can escape in the designated quiet car — although always ready for those assuming that “quiet” means they can talk on their phones from New York to D.C. as long as they don’t speak above normal volume.

Sooner or later it would appear that planes are going to be the same way — but it will be worse. Planes shove us up closer together. You’re cramped, dealing with the relentless engine drone, dry air, turbulence,

screaming kids, and horrible food if any.

Just wait till on top of all that, half the passengers are yakking idly about nothing. I suspect that even extra expense will be a minor deterrent, because most human beings, like Dr. Z., only read much if they have to.

I am just back from a trip to Germany. On the way back I sat next to a woman who paged fitfully once or twice through a light magazine she had brought along, watched the movie with mild interest, and otherwise tried her best to sleep, even though she evidently was not sleepy.

What she really wanted to do was what humans have always done most readily. She, as a social animal, wanted to be talking. The second the plane hit the tarmac she snapped out her phone and was talking away from then on, stopping only to show her passport at customs, and then talking on.

If she had been able to use the phone on board, I would have had to listen to her talking for, quite possibly, eight straight hours, or the better part of them. The issue would not be whether she was loud — shouting into cell phones was more common when the technology wasn’t good years ago.

The issue is that one half of a conversation is, to anyone else, noise, like a child next door’s stop-and-start attempts to play “The Entertainer.”

I wonder whether there is room for a ban on cell phone usage in planes for simple reasons of civility. Once people are allowed to use their cell on a plane, most will — and a lot. Am I alone in finding it a vaguely nauseating prospect to be trapped in a flying tube for hours surrounded by people telling their friends “I’m on a plane. Yeah … I’m on a plane”?

Mr. McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.