The phrase "adapted mind" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe a mind that has been modified or adjusted to better fit certain circumstances or environments.
Example: "In today's rapidly changing world, having an adapted mind is essential for success in any field."
Alternatives: "flexible mindset" or "adjusted intellect".
Barkow, J. H., Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J. (eds) The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture Oxford Univ. Presss, 1995).
In their 1992 book "The adapted mind," Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby (1992) popularized the term evolutionary psychology.
But in constructing their model of "the adapted mind," these researchers left out the idea that general intelligence is flexible; that humans can, to a certain extent, consciously direct their actions.
"Psychologists should be interested in evolutionary biology for the same reason that hikers should be interested in an aerial map of an unfamiliar territory that they plan to explore on foot," wrote Dr. Leda Cosmides, Dr. John Tooby and Dr. John Barkow in the introduction to "The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture" (Oxford, 1992).
More recently, studies of "cognition in the wild" (Hutchins 1996), the "adapted mind" (Barkow et al. 1992), "ecological rationality" (Gigerenzer et al. 1999), and the origins of religious faith in innate human biases and predispositions (Atran and Norenzayan 2004) have shed light on the formation of both rational and irrational beliefs and belief systems.
The ability to cope with the immense variety of human ancestral environments and social forms, he argues, depended not just on adapted minds but also on adapted developmental environments.
[T]he author's restraint and generous stance ensure that evolutionary psychologists have to take Adapting Minds seriously...
[Buller] hopes that Adapting Minds can clear the way for some actual science about how evolution equips us to have psychologies.
After Adapting Minds it is impossible to ever again think that human behavior is the Stone Age artifact that evolutionary psychology claims.
We read James not for his stories or for his characters but for the one thing that can't be adapted: his mind.
Pamela Kirk Prentice is the chief research officer at SAS Institute Inc. Portions of this report are adapted from "Minding the Analytics Gap," MIT Sloan Management Review, volume 56, no. 3 (Spring 2015), pp. 63-68.
