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It has been proposed that climate adaptation research can benefit from an evolutionary approach. But related empirical research is lacking. We advance the evolutionary study of climate adaptation with two case studies from contemporary United States agriculture. First, we define ‘cultural adaptation to climate change’ as a mechanistic process of population-level cultural change. We argue this definition enables rigorous comparisons, yields testable hypotheses from mathematical theory and distinguishes adaptive change, non-adaptive change and desirable policy outcomes. Next, we develop an operational approach to identify ‘cultural adaptation to climate change’ based on established empirical criteria. We apply this approach to data on crop choices and the use of cover crops between 2008 and 2021 from the United States. We find evidence that crop choices are adapting to local trends in two separate climate variables in some regions of the USA. But evidence suggests that cover cropping may be adapting more to the economic environment than climatic conditions. Further research is needed to characterize the process of cultural adaptation, particularly the routes and mechanisms of cultural transmission. Furthermore, climate adaptation policy could benefit from research on factors that differentiate regions exhibiting adaptive trends in crop choice from those that do not. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Climate change adaptation needs a science of culture’. 

Social change in any society entails changes in both behaviours and institutions. We model a group-structured society in which the transmission of individual behaviour occurs in parallel with the selection of group-level institutions. We consider a cooperative behaviour that generates collective benefits for groups but does not spread between individuals on its own. Groups exhibit institutions that increase the diffusion of the behaviour within the group, but also incur a group cost. Groups adopt institutions in proportion to their fitness. Finally, the behaviour may also spread globally. We find that behaviour and institutions can be mutually reinforcing. But the model also generates behavioural source-sink dynamics when behaviour generated in institutionalized groups spreads to non-institutionalized groups and boosts their fitness. Consequently, the global diffusion of group-beneficial behaviour creates a pattern of institutional free-riding that limits the evolution of group-beneficial institutions. Our model suggests that, in a group-structured society, large-scale beneficial social change can be best achieved when the relevant behaviour and institutions remain correlated.