An Empirical Examination of Adaptationists' Attitudes Toward Politics and Science. You can find a full preprint at Geoffrey Miller's site. The abstract:
Critics of evolutionary psychology and sociobiology have advanced an adaptationists-as-right-wing-conspirators (ARC) hypothesis, suggesting that adaptationists use their research to support a right-wing political agenda. We report the first quantitative test of the ARC hypothesis based on an online survey of political and scientific attitudes among 168 US psychology Ph.D. students, 31 of whom self-identified as adaptationists and 137 others who identified with another non-adaptationist meta-theory. Results indicate that adaptationists are much less politically conservative than typical US citizens and no more politically conservative than non-adaptationist graduate students. Also, contrary to the "adaptationists-as-pseudo-scientists" stereotype, adaptationists endorse more rigorous, progressive, quantitative scientific methods in the study of human behavior than non-adaptationists.
Some interesting points from the paper:
The two groups did not differ in sex ratio, χ2 (2, N = 168) = .406, p = .524 (adaptationists 64.5% female, non-adaptationists 70.4% female) or age, t(164) = 1.16, p = .248 (adaptationist mean 26.97, non-adaptationist mean 28.17). ... ...Reported p values were derived from two-tailed Fisher's exact tests. Zero of the 31 adaptationists and 13 of the 137 non-adaptationists (11.2%) identified with the Republican party, p = .130. Two of the 31 adaptationists (6.5%) and 21 of the 137 non-adaptationists (18.1%) identified with Republicans or Libertarians, p = .256. Neither test revealed statistically significant group differences in party identification.
