The Adapted Mind
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| Author | Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (editors) |
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| Language | English |
| Subject | Evolutionary psychology |
| Genre | Non-fiction |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press |
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Publication date
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1992 |
The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture is an edited volume, first published in 1992 by Oxford University Press, edited by Jerome Barkow, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby. It is widely considered the foundational text of evolutionary psychology (EP), and outlines Cosmides and Tooby's integration of concepts from evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology, as well as many other concepts that would become important in adaptationist research.
For practical purposes the book can be divided in two parts. The first part (pp. 1–159) lays out the theoretical foundations of evolutionary psychology. It consists of the introduction, written by Cosmides, Tooby and Barkow, an essay written by Tooby and Cosmides entitled The psychological foundations of culture, and an essay written by anthropologist Donald Symons entitled On the use and misuse of Darwinism in the study of human behavior. The second part (pp. 160–637) is a collection of empirical research papers meant to introduce the reader to some topics of interest in evolutionary psychology, such as mating, social and developmental psychology, perceptual adaptations etc. It includes contributions from the best known evolutionary psychologists of the time such as Steven Pinker, David Buss, Martin Daly, Margo Wilson and others.
By far the most important text in the volume is "The Psychological Foundations of Culture", by Tooby and Cosmides. The first forty pages or so of this essay are devoted to an extensive critique of what the authors call the 'SSSM', short for 'Standard Social Science Model'. 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. Only some instinctive and primitive biological drives like hunger and thirst have been retained in the 'nature' category.
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