The jargon of evolutionary psychology has recently migrated from a few minor American universities into the academic mainstream and thence into Sunday supplements and dinner party conversations. It has even formed the backdrop to at least one award-winning novel (McEwan, 1997). Evolutionary psychology and other similar ‘biological’ explanations of human conduct pervade the Zeitgeist and, as Kenan Malik has persuasively argued, they tap into a prevailing mood of cultural pessimism. Evolutionary psychology, it seems, speaks to our desire to see the (...) worst in ourselves (Malik, 2002). (shrink)

I introduce a range of examples of different causal hypotheses about human mate selection. The hypotheses I focus on come from evolutionary psychology, fluctuating asymmetry research and chemical signaling research. I argue that a major obstacle facing an integrated biology of human behavior is the lack of a causal framework that shows how multiple proximate causal mechanisms can act together to produce components of our behavior.