I found this posting of interest, from the comments section at Crooked Timber:

“As to why most academics are liberal, liberals believe in boring things like fact checking and peer review that are the nuts and bolts of scholarly life. Conservatives, especially, the Potemkin Intellectuals in right-wing think tanks, think that they already know the answers, so why bother. Look at the staff of, say, Commentary Magazine, which has come out against Darwinian evolution. Do they care about evidence? Clearly not.”

One might add that National Review recently ran a scandalously incompetent review of Beckwith’s apologia for creationism in the public schools, which manifests the same total incompetence with basic science. (The review, alas, is not on-line, so I can’t link to it.)