Metalogue: what is the instinct of Tao?

Definition of insinct: in animal psychology and ethology, “nervous mechanism hierarchically organized, with innate action patterns, sensitive to certain environmental stimuli that arouse it, put it in action and direct it, to which it responds with well-coordinated movements which have as their purpose the preservation of the individual or species". The animal instinct (which leads for example the birds to build nests) is more complex than reflection; does not change either during the life of the individual or through several generations of individuals of the same species, and become less rigid or preformed and so much more connected to learning as going up in the zoological scale..

quoted from Nikolaas Tinbergen, Nobel prize 1973 in Physiology and Medicine shared with  Karl von Frisch and Konrad Lorenz

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Definition of Metalogue: A metalogue is a conversation about some problematic subject. This conversation should be such that not only do the participants discuss the problem but the structure of the conversation as a whole is also relevant to the same subject.

Notably, the history of evolutionary theory is inevitably a metalogue between man and nature, in which the creation and interaction of ideas must necessarily exemplify evolutionary process.

Daughter: Daddy, what is an instinct?

Father: An instinct, my dear, is a explanatory principle.

D: But what does it explain?

F: Anything—almost anything at all. Anything you want it to explain.

D: Don't be silly. It doesn't explain gravity.

F: No. But that is because nobody wants "instinct" to explain gravity. If they did, it would explain it. We could simply say that the moon has an instinct whose strength varies inversely as thesquare of the distance .. .

D: But that's nonsense, Daddy.

F: Yes, surely. But it was you who mentioned "instinct," not I.

D: All right—but then what does explain gravity?

F: Nothing, my dear, because gravity is an explanatory principle.

D: Oh.

D: Do you mean that you cannot use one explanatory principle to explain another? Never?

F: Hmm . . . hardly ever. That is what Newton meant when he said,"hypotheses non fingo."

D: And what does that mean? Please.

F: Well, you know what "hypotheses" are. Any statement linking together two descriptive statements is an hypothesis. If you say that there was a full moon on February 1st and another on March 1st; and then you link these two observations together in any way, the statement which links them is an hypothesis.

D: Yes—and I know what non means. But what's fingo?

F: Well—fingo is a late Latin word for "make." It forms a verbal

noun fictio from which we get the word "fiction."

D: Daddy, do you mean that Sir Isaac Newton thought that all hypotheses were just made up like stories?

F: Yes—precisely that

D: But didn't he discover gravity? With the apple? F: No, dear. He invented it.

D: Oh.... Daddy, who invented instinct?

F: I don't know. Probably biblical.

D: But if the idea of gravity links together two descriptive statements, it must be an hypothesis.

F: That's right.

D: Then Newton did fingo an hypothesis after all.

F: Yes—indeed he did. He was a very great scientist.

D : Oh.

D: Daddy, is an explanatory principle the same thing as anhypothesis?

F: Nearly, but not quite. You see, an hypothesis tries to explain some particular something but an explanatory principle—like "gravity" or "instinct"—really explains nothing. It's a sort of conventional agreement between scientists to stop trying to explain things at a certain point.

D: Then is that what Newton meant? If "gravity" explains nothing but is only a sort of full stop at the end of a line of explanation, then inventing gravity was not the same as inventing an hypothesis, and he could say he did not fingo any hypotheses.

F: That's right. There's no explanation of an explanatory principle. It's like a black box.

D: Oh.