Disclosed is an adaptive receiving MIMO (multi input and multi output) system and method which decides a symbol detecting order so as to estimate the symbol having the minimum summation of weights of least square errors at the time of estimating the symbol for respective equalizers provided in parallel by the number of transmit antennas, and updates filter tap coefficients based on the RLS algorithm according to the detecting orders. Therefore, the filter tap coefficients are directly updated without tracking channels in the time-varying channel environment, and accordingly, detection performance very similar to those of the channel tracking and conventional V-BLAST scheme is provided with reduced complexity.