Of the diverse calls for a self-consciously ‘Darwinian’ anthropology, none is particularly satisfactory. In this paper I review five such calls and discuss their shortcomings in the light of anthropological knowledge. These are (i) the call to model cultural variation as genetic; (ii) the call to interpret all human social behaviour as ‘fitness-maximising’; (iii) the theory of memes; (iv) the use of chimpanzees as models for human behaviour; and (v) Darwinism as an evangelical ideology. I conclude with a programme for an inclusive, scientific anthropology that is consistent with Darwinian biology.