Miller-Urey Follow-up

Despite the fact that the Stanley-Miller experiment is struggling as far as icons go (even Wikipedia admits that the 1953 experiment was flawed and inaccurate), textbooks today give absolutely no indication that anything is wrong. I don't mean to sound like a conspiracy theorist ranting on about "secret societies" and such, but look at the passage I took out of my Princeton Review AP Biology Exam 2013 book just this afternoon.

Magloire, Kim. Cracking the AP Biology Exam. Random House: New York, 2013. Reproduced without permission.

Read it carefully. If you looked at my last post (see below if you haven't), you'd know that Wikipedia, the Scientific American and Stanley Miller himself admitted that his 1953 trial was worthless to the abiogenesis movement. He re-did the experiment himself in 1983, and found that if he used the correct elements in his setup, he wound up with a worthless (biologically speaking) brown sludge. Of course, there are theories to explain this away - but why are they not presented in the text above? Why do the authors (willfully or intentionally) avoid this rather large problem with their example? Note the phrasing - "They put the gases theorized to be abundant" - even though we now know that methane and ammonia were hardly present at the time of the primordial soup! Miller acted on the prevalent theory of his time - so why does the textbook fail to mention this? Did the author think it unimportant?

"But how do we make the leap from simple organic molecule to more complex compounds and life as we know it? Since no one was around to witness the process (italics mine), no one knows for sure how (or when) it occurred."

 If we don't know how or when it occurred, and no one was around to witness it, how can we be confident it occurred in the first place? (And they are so confident, the writer didn't even see a need to mention these potential problems, however trifling they may be). The next line is also important:

Complex organic compounds (such as proteins) must have formed via dehydration synthesis.

 They must have? The logic here is: since evolution is true and humans are here today, complex organic compounds must have formed spontaneously, an occurrence that has never been reproduced even in  controlled laboratory setting. The author, unknowingly perhaps, automatically precludes any other origin theories in this sentence. And this, folks, is the AP Biology Prep book - it's like a Bible to all the aspiring Bio students out there (including me). They might spend 3-4 months poring over every page, memorizing every fact - including this one, regarding the Miller-Urey experiment (I have to do the same myself). But who will tell those people that the information is faulty?

In the words of Sherlock Holmes, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." If evolution is false, the only alternate solution (unless you buy into all that "am I a man dreaming I'm a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming I'm a man" stuff) is special creation by a deity. It's important to note that I'm not saying that the authors and the publishers of the Princeton Review (and any other textbook out there) are trying to brainwash you - no, they may be unaware of what they do themselves. I'm just warning the reader not to take anything they read at face value, especially when it deals with matters of the soul, as evolution inevitably does. For if evolution is true, all is meaningless; but if it is false, the human soul is eternal (almost all religions agree upon that, at least). To close, I'll just close with some words from Adolf Hitler (don't take them the wrong way, please!):

"Let me control the textbooks, and I will control the state."