The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture is a 1992 book edited by the anthropologists Jerome H. Barkow and John Tooby and the psychologist Leda Cosmides.

The term refers to a metatheory that the authors claim has dominated the behavioral and social sciences throughout the twentieth century, blending radical environmentalism with blind empiricism.

The SSSM has retained and reified the nature/nurture dichotomy, and its practitioners have meticulously amassed evidence over the years which 'proves' that the overwhelming majority of psychological phenomena fall in the 'nurture' category.

In its place Tooby and Cosmides propose a distinction between "open" and "closed" developmental programs, which refers to the extent to which our various psychological mechanisms can vary in their manifest form depending on the input they receive during development.

This academic preoccupation with domain-general mechanisms, they suggest, stems directly from the folk notion of man as a rational being that has largely lost or suppressed its animalesque instincts and now operates primarily according to reason.

The argument may be summarised as follows: since domain-general mechanisms come without innate content, they must work out the solution to each problem from scratch through costly and potentially lethal trial-and-error.

Critics argue that Cosmides and Tooby's conclusions contain several inferential errors and that the authors use untested evolutionary assumptions to eliminate rival reasoning theories.