In behaviour, we sometimes talk of proximate and ultimate reasons where proximate means the closest to and ultimate is the underlying reason with ties to our evolution. I think I mentioned an example before where we explain why a reindeer runs away from a bear. The proximate reason is that the bear scares the reindeer. The ultimate reason is that reindeers have evolved to avoid potential predators.
In arguments about behaviour, it's often useful to remember to not mix ultimates and proximates.
As for ultimate reasons for rape, from what I can remember, there are two leading schools of thought. One is that rape is a valid strategy. Noise has explained it quite well already and it does seem to make some sense. Sorry if this sounds awful, but for the sake of argument, the pros to raping someone is that you can potentially have a child with someone with very little expense - whatever effort you spend performing the rape. Also, you can have a child with someone who would not select you as their partner. Perhaps noone would, then rape could become the only valid strategy to ensuring the survival of your genes.
There are some obvious cons. Women may be able to protect themselves, a child growing up without a father (although perhaps a rapist could become a caring father) could have worse chances, the act may be avenged by the mother and her closest or even society etc. In a way, it is a gamble and it doesn't make sense if there are better ways of ensuring your genes survival. It should make sense that it's a losers strategy, one most often employed by people who are not able to find partners for sex by consent, for example because they are plain unattractive, society's losers, sick in the head - something which keeps them from getting laid. It makes sense that rapists should be a minority in a society, although this depends strongly on that society's structure. Some societies unfortunately take a lot of power away from women.
The other leading idea is that it's a byproduct of selection of other traits. Essential to evolution is variation. People are not the same. Many men have strong sex drives and a capacity for violence. This has, to some extent, been selected for in the past. However, you will find people with more of this and less. The idea is, then, that if it becomes too much, the chances of someone committing rape is much higher. This hypothesis differs in that rapists shouldn't necessarily be something which is done largely by society's losers (those who can't get sex by consent), but rather by people who have these personality traits .. whoever they are. Thus, men rape more often because of a general higher capacity for violence and a higher sex drive.
I don't think one hypotheses has to exclude the other. Possibly, if one knew something about the kind of person the average rapist is, one could use some simple stats to find support for one of these hypotheses. I believe most rapists are losers, but I'm in no way sure about it. Maybe if you differentiate between violent rape and raping someone who's passed out from alcohol, you'd find support that violent rape is a strategy employed by losers while the other kind could be done by more average sort of people.
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