By Sydney Byerly
The Indiana Citizen
August 29, 2025
Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith, in a recent podcast appearance, linked the teaching of evolution in schools to despair, rising suicide rates among youth, and what he calls a collapse of moral order.
His most pointed remarks came during an August 15 appearance on The Elevate Media Podcast, where he discussed conviction, leadership, and culture.
“We teach things like evolution in school, right? And evolution says we’re all animals, we’ve just evolved,” Beckwith explained. “OK, fine, if you want to teach that. But don’t be mad when kids commit suicide because all they’re doing is [telling them] they’re not strong enough to make it to the next day. We’ve taught them that survival of the fittest means the strong survive and the weak die.”
Beckwith contrasted this with what he sees as the God-given moral conscience that guides human behavior.“Even the far-left radical won’t agree with, ‘Oh, we should just go out and kill everybody and take for ourselves.’ There is a conscience that was placed there by God, their Creator, that they know that’s not right. … Lions will attack a gazelle, rip that thing to shreds — nobody cares about that. So why don’t we do the same thing as humans? Oh, because there’s something different about humans.”
During the hour-long podcast, Beckwith drew a direct connection between evolutionary teaching and the mental health struggles of young people.
“You wonder why depression is skyrocketing with our youth, and suicide, and all of that,” he said. “It’s because we’ve taken out their identity. We’ve taken out their purpose. We’ve taken out the value and the worth of who they are.”
Beckwith added: “You know, it’s interesting — we tell our kids they’re just evolved animals, and then we wonder why they act like animals. If we don’t teach them they’re created with purpose, value, and worth, we’re setting them up for despair.”
Critics of Beckwith’s position maintain that evolutionary science is essential to modern biology and should be taught in schools without religious framing.
Armin Moczek, a professor of biology at Indiana University and recipient of multiple awards for his work on evolutionary developmental biology, said that evolution is studied and taught not only because it answers fundamental questions about life’s history, but because it has direct applications to public health, food security and the economy.
“When we design vaccines, like for the flu, we model the evolution of viruses to predict which one is going to be most dangerous, then target that one,” he said. “The emergence of multidrug resistance among bacteria is fundamentally an evolutionary process that threatens the lives of thousands of people in the U.S., including for Hoosiers. The same is true of crop pests and livestock breeding. Understanding how evolution works and applying that knowledge saves lives, ensures our food supply and creates employment.”
According to Moczek, students who learn evolutionary principles are better equipped to make sense of the living world around them.
“They understand why organisms are the way they are, the changes they underwent over long periods of time to arrive at the present and our own biological origins as a species,” he said. “On top of that, understanding evolutionary principles and applications helps them make good choices e.g. when it comes to their health, or better understand when and how pandemics may unfold, or what it might take to make our food supply more secure.”
He also pushed back on Beckwith’s framing of “survival of the fittest.”
“The evolutionary process is more than survival of the fittest,” Moczek said. “Many mechanisms contribute to shaping outcomes, and many of these outcomes are extraordinary: think of the light-producing organs of fireflies, ants building bridges out of their own bodies to get to food, or a plant like the Venus fly trap moving fast enough to catch prey.”
He added: “Learning about evolution in high school biology adds to our understanding of how each of these came to be, and more generally about how the natural world around us has changed over time to arrive at the present. It’s at least as fundamental as learning about electricity in physics, or how a battery works in chemistry.”
Studies on teen suicide do not identify evolution education as a risk factor. The overwhelming scientific consensus is that suicide is a complex public health issue influenced by a variety of known risk factors.
In the U.S., teen suicidal thoughts and attempts have shown promising declines in recent years, according to the 2024 National Survey on Drug Use and Health — ideation dropped from nearly 13% in 2021 to 10% in 2024, and attempts fell from 3.6% to 2.7%.
Yet suicide remains the second leading cause of death among youth.
Key risk factors identified in the study include untreated mental health disorders like depression and anxiety; prior suicide attempts; access to guns; exposure to trauma, bullying, and social media pressures; family rejection; and belonging to vulnerable demographics such as LGBTQ+ youth or those with disabilities.
The lieutenant governor’s remarks reflect a broader concern among some conservatives and faith leaders who argue that removing divine purpose from education undermines moral order and contributes to social crises. Beckwith positioned his critique as a call for schools and communities to reintroduce teaching about human value rooted in creation.
Beckwith’s comments highlight the continuing tension over how schools address evolution and creation. For him, the stakes are not merely academic, but cultural and existential.
“If we don’t give them purpose, if we don’t give them worth, if we don’t give them value,” he said, “we shouldn’t be surprised when they lose hope.”
Beckwith has repeated these themes, reinforcing his view that evolutionary teaching erodes human purpose and moral grounding. On a May 26 episode of his own podcast, Unscripted with Micah Beckwith, he tied the debate to broader cultural upheaval.
“If there’s no Creator, then who decides what’s right and wrong? It just becomes whoever’s in power. That’s why you see chaos in culture when we remove God from the equation.”
Framing the debate as part of a larger “worldview battle,” Beckwith added: “The left says, ‘Oh, it’s just science,’ but really they’re pushing a worldview. Evolution isn’t just about biology, it’s about telling kids they don’t matter. That’s why we have to push back.”
Sydney Byerly is a political reporter who grew up in New Albany, Indiana. Before joining The Citizen, Sydney reported news for TheStatehouseFile.com and most recently managed and edited The Corydon Democrat & Clarion News in southern Indiana. She earned her bachelor’s in journalism at Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism (‘Sco Griz!).
The Indiana Citizen is a nonpartisan, nonprofit platform dedicated to increasing the number of informed and engaged Hoosier citizens. We are operated by the Indiana Citizen Education Foundation, Inc., a 501(c)(3) public charity. For questions about the story, contact Marilyn Odendahl at marilyn.odendahl@indianacitizen.org.
