The organizational account of biological functions interprets functions as contributions of a trait to the maintenance of the organization that, in turn, maintains the trait. As it has been recently argued, however, the account seems unable to provide a unified grounding for both intra-generation and cross-generation functions, since the latter do not contribute to the maintenance of the same organization which produces them. To face this "ontological problem", a splitting account has been

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... sed, according to which the two kinds of functions require distinct organizational definitions. In this paper, we propose a solution for the ontological problem, by arguing that intra-and cross-generation functions can be said to contribute in the same way to the maintenance of the biological organization, characterized in terms of organizational self-maintenance. As a consequence, we suggest maintaining a unified organizational account of biological functions.