Many would agree on the usefulness of evolutionary theory for understanding our bodies. There is less agreement, however, regarding its usefulness for understanding human behaviour—and those who do see the value disagree on how it should be applied. Here, I compare and contrast the three major paradigms in the evolutionary behavioural sciences (human behavioural ecology, evolutionary psychology, and dual inheritance theory) and their approaches to understanding pairbonding, a near-ubiquitous feature of human mating systems, and related behaviours. I will show that they differ not only in underlying assumptions, but also the pairbonding-related topics they have attempted to tackle. I conclude by briefly evaluating three pathways that have been proposed for integrating the approaches.

Dr Geoff Kushnick (PhD, University of Washington) is a human behavioural ecologist and Senior Lecturer in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at The Australian National University. His research is based on fieldwork in Indonesia and the Solomon Islands, and on comparative analyses of cross-cultural data.

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