Where Does Meaning Come From? A Biological Explanation
Why biology keeps reaching for purpose, and why it never quite succeeds on its own
Modern biology has always carried more than descriptive ambition. From Darwin onward, attempts to explain life have repeatedly bled into attempts to explain how life should be lived. These efforts are often dismissed as crude reductions—echoes of social Darwinism, or ideological attempts to naturalise hierarchy, competition, or inequality. Yet this dismissal misses something important.
As Howard Kaye argues, the recurring effort to extract meaning, guidance, or moral direction from biology is not merely conservative or defensive. It is often culturally radical. It reflects a deep discomfort with purely social or symbolic accounts of human life, and a persistent desire to anchor identity, value, and purpose in something older, deeper, and more “real” than culture alone (Kaye, 2017).
The problem is not that biology is irrelevant to meaning. It is that biology, when stretched beyond its proper domain, becomes internally contradictory.
Biology explains machinery. Meaning explains orientation.
When biology is treated as destiny, the result is not clarity but confusion—particularly around freedom, responsibility, and moral choice.
Read: The Biology of Myth.
Meaning is not a Product of the Nervous System
One of the persistent mistakes in discussions of meaning is the assumption that meaning itself is a psychological output, akin to emotion or motivation. But meaning is not reducible to any single biological or cognitive process.
Baumeister and Landau distinguish between several layers of meaning that are often collapsed together. Signs—such as words or symbols—derive meaning through nonphysical connections and shared organisation. Existential meaning, by contrast, concerns purpose, value, mattering, continuity, and coherence across time (Baumeister & Landau, 2018).
Crucially, meaning does not emerge from raw sensation or isolated cognition. It emerges through relation: relating new experiences to what is already known, embedding events within narrative structures, and anchoring personal experience within shared frameworks.
This is why meaning cannot be fully individual. Even when experienced privately, it is scaffolded socially. Language, values, norms, roles, and collective narratives provide the architecture within which personal meaning becomes possible at all.
Biology enables this process. It does not define it.
Read: The Dopamine Economy.
Why Just Biology is not the Answer
Advances in ethology, sociobiology, neuropsychology, and behavioural genetics have dramatically improved our understanding of how organisms behave, adapt, and regulate themselves. These fields have brought us closer to describing the physical and neural machinery underlying perception, motivation, learning, and social interaction.
The temptation, then, is to unify explanation: to treat human behaviour, morality, and even purpose as emergent properties of biological systems alone.
Kaye shows why this unification repeatedly fails. Biological explanations of human action inevitably smuggle in assumptions about freedom and choice that they cannot justify on their own. Humans are treated as both determined mechanisms and responsible agents—without resolving the contradiction (Kaye, 2017).
This tension is not accidental. It reflects the fact that meaning operates at a different level of organisation than biological causation. Biology describes how systems function. Meaning describes how systems orient themselves.
Confusing the two leads to either dehumanisation or incoherence.
Read: Why Ambition Breaks Without Belonging.
Money as a Biological Proxy for Meaning
The strange motivational power of money offers a useful illustration.
Money has no intrinsic biological value. It does not feed, shelter, or reproduce us directly. Yet it exerts extraordinary incentive and reinforcing power—often exceeding that of biologically primary rewards.
Lea and Webley identify two mechanisms by which this occurs. First, money functions as a tool: an abstract instrument for obtaining biologically relevant resources. Second, it functions like a drug: it mimics the motivational properties of natural incentives without delivering the underlying fitness gains those incentives evolved to secure (Lea & Webley, 2006).
In other words, money hijacks meaning systems.
It becomes a proxy for security, status, control, and future possibility. Its power is not biological in origin, but biological in effect. The nervous system responds to money because money has been culturally imbued with significance that maps onto deeply evolved motivational circuits.
This is not an anomaly. It is a pattern.
Meaning attaches itself to symbols that organise behaviour over time, especially under conditions of uncertainty. Biology provides the sensitivity. Culture supplies the signal.
Read: The Mythology of Ambition.
Meaning, Health, and Adaptive Functioning
The importance of meaning becomes especially clear when we move beyond disease models of health.
Much of biomedical and psychological research focuses on breakdown: pathology, dysfunction, deterioration. But this perspective tells us little about what allows people to remain resilient, adaptive, and physically healthy over time.
Evidence increasingly suggests that positive psychological functioning—optimism, purpose, coherence, perceived meaning—contributes to better physical health outcomes, not merely better mental health (Kubzansky et al., 2015).
This does not mean that meaning directly “causes” health in a simplistic sense. Rather, meaning shapes behaviour, regulation, and engagement with the environment. It influences how people interpret stress, adhere to health behaviours, maintain social bonds, and recover from adversity.
Once again, biology is involved—but not sufficient.
Meaning operates as a regulatory layer that coordinates biological systems across time.
Aging, Meaning, & the Social Dimension of Biology
The bio-psycho-social model of aging makes this layered interaction explicit.
Aging is a biological process involving progressive changes in cellular regulation, metabolism, and tissue function. These changes affect energy, cognition, mood, and physical capacity. But biological aging does not determine how aging is experienced or integrated (Dziechciaż & Filip, 2014).
Psychological aging concerns awareness, adaptation, and attitude. Social aging concerns roles, expectations, and cultural narratives about what it means to be old.
Different adaptive stances toward aging—constructive, dependent, hostile—are not reducible to biology. They emerge from the interaction between biological change, psychological meaning-making, and social context.
Here, meaning becomes decisive. Not in preventing aging, but in shaping whether it is experienced as decline, transition, contribution, or coherence across life.
Biology sets constraints. Meaning determines orientation within them.
Why Meaning Cannot be Engineered Biologically
The modern fascination with genetic explanations and biological control reflects a deeper anxiety: the fear that meaning itself is unstable, contingent, or arbitrary.
If meaning could be anchored in biology—encoded, optimised, engineered—it might feel safer.
But this safety is illusory.
Attempts to biologise meaning inevitably strip it of the very features that make it meaningful: choice, responsibility, narrative continuity, and moral orientation. What remains is behaviour without authorship.
Meaning does not arise from control. It arises from participation in systems larger than the self—biological, social, and symbolic—without being reducible to any one of them.
The biology of meaning is not about discovering purpose hidden in our genes. It is about understanding the conditions under which biological systems become capable of orienting themselves toward purpose at all.
That orientation is always relational. Always scaffolded. Always unfinished.
And that is precisely why it matters.
Work With Me
If you’re a founder, leader, or high-capacity professional, you don’t need motivation. You need clarity, self-command, and a nervous system capable of sustaining the level of responsibility you’re carrying.
Most people who end up here haven’t failed. Their ambition has simply outgrown the biological systems required to support it.
That’s the problem-space I work in.
I work at the intersection of biology, psychology, and narrative strategy to help people restore coherence between identity, responsibility, and capacity. Decisions become clearer. Patterns lose their grip. Ambition stops exacting a hidden physiological cost.
This work isn’t for everyone.
It’s for people who want depth, precision, and a thinking partner who can see the underlying structure of what’s happening — and who won’t collude with avoidance or performative insight.
If something in this article touched a tension you recognise, you can book a consultation here.
We’ll look at where you are in your current cycle of growth, what your system is responding to, and whether this way of working is the right fit.
