A lot of the reason most people aren’t aware of what we don’t/do know with regards to evolution is due to political correctness.

Can you expound on why you think this? As someone with a degree in the area, who's worked in it, and attempts to keep up with literature even now that I'm in tech, I can't think of many/any areas where general knowledge is kept out of textbooks for PC reasons.

The textbooks are out of date simply because human evolution is a quickly changing field and unless you actively attempt to keep up, you're not going to be able to maintain expertise. Even if that weren't true, the general public would struggle because it's a deeply unintuitive subject that invalidates many of the common sense norms we're used to in society, like race realism.

A Brief History of Everything talks about how little we know about everything. Everywhere we look we just find more and more mysteries. Evolution is like this as well -- while you could explain it easily especially to someone with just a tiny bit of programmer knowledge using Tierra -- we have immense gaps , perhaps the biggest: how did it start? How did monomers become polymers in a sea when the peptide bond requires the removal of H2O?

Abiogenesis is not evolution. In fact, the whole messy bit at the base of biota, where an organism (or protobiont) was as likely to share material with a neighbour as to undergo any other process, can hardly be thought of as "evolution". For all intents and purposes, that part could all be frikkin' magic, and it wouldn't hurt evolutionary biology at all.