Yeah, and you know, scientists go into science because they're thinking about these deep questions about the nature of reality. And then their career is kind of demand that they focus in and hone in and specialize on one small kind of problem. And yeah, I think all of us wanted this philosophy of our ziastic science. We got into this because we wanted to think big about the nature of reality. What is science telling us about the nature of reality for sure? Yeah,

yeah. Okay, shipping gears a bit. Okay, so now we have this view of functions and purposes. So instead of flying into biological functions, would build group level functions, do the rules playing? Well, that's a

it's a really big question. And that too touches on a deep bias in the history of biology. So I think really starting in the 1970s, there's this idea that when I try to explain the function of part of the mind, say the function of attention or the function of awareness or the function of the zebra stripes, whatever it is, I have to point to some benefit that that trait confers on that particular individual. So when I say that the function of the zebra stripes is too deterbiting flies, I'm pointing to some benefit that it confers on that particular zebra. It helps that zebra survive where it helps that zebra to reproduce. But then of course, there are aspects of the biological world where a trait has the function for a group, not for the particular individual. So, you know, the bees stinger is a wonderful example of something that obviously it doesn't have a function for the bee because when the bee stings somebody, it usually kills the bee. The stinger is just ripped, you know, ripped out of its body and its innards just get mutilated. So to the extent that it has a function, we need to talk about the function of the stinger for the hive or for the group. And similarly, when we talk about, say, altruism in human beings or in other animals, you have these species that are very altruistic, you know, naked mole rats, kind of like honeybees. They will happily die for the sake of the colony as a whole. And you really can't. It's hard to understand that aggressive behavior in terms of a benefit for that particular individual, either in terms of its survival or its reproductive reproduction, you're really thinking about a benefit for the group as a whole. And I think in the kind of when evolutionary psychology was getting off the ground in the 19, well, it goes back sometime, you know, socio biology of the 1970s and then evolutionary psychology of the 1980s, when you start looking at the functions of the human mind in terms of how do our cognitive processes help us to survive and reproduce, there was this very kind of individualistic bias where, in order to think about the function of human cognition or human behavior, there's this kind of prejudice that you had to think about it in terms of how do these functions benefit me as an individual. But of course, there are certain kinds of behavior that it's really hard to give to explain why somebody acts the way they do in terms of some kind of benefit that they receive for their behavior. So, again, instances of just altruism, instances of people giving away large sums of money anonymously, where they're not even getting the benefit of social recognition for their actions. And people do things like this all the time, not necessarily on such a large scale, but on small scales, people often help others in ways that they never get any particular credit for. And it's hard to explain why this altruistic tendency in people, unless you assume that kind of like, honeybees, human altruism isn't always designed to help the individual survive and reproduce. It's meant to help the group as a whole. And I think one benefit of the selected effects theory is that it's not or any account of function that's worth thinking deeply about is that it's not, it doesn't contain this kind of, it doesn't presuppose this individual level bias when we're thinking about functions. The selected effects theory lets us talk about, you know, the function of the heart is to pump blood because that's how it helps me survive. The function of the honeybee stingers to support the hive because that's how it helps the hive survive. There's no assumption that functions have to benefit the individual in some way.

And again, I think fortunately, psychology and cognitive science are kind of moving that direction. We're more and more recognizing the identity in the agency of groups as something not ontologically different from, but something operational different from the collection of individuals.