John Locke and Gottfried Leibniz were 17th century geniuses who disagreed on the origins of individual knowledge. When two geniuses disagree, only one can be correct. Or perhaps, they each had a part of the whole, the entirety of which neither grasped in full.
Locke was an English Empiricist whose "tabula rasa" view on individual knowledge is often summarized with Thomas Aquinas's peripatetic axiom, "Nihil est in intellectu quod non sit prius in sensu"... nothing is in the intellect which was not first in the senses. In other words, we are born "blank slates" and only come to knowledge by degrees of experience.
How then, do we all come to share at least a "primal" set of values? How do we all "know" to prefer a gentle kiss over accidental smacks in the head?
In contrast to Locke, Leibniz was a German Rationalist who believed that some ideas were innate to humans at birth through their souls. The two men shared at least the common language of Latin, and in direct response to Locke's peripatetic empiricism, Leibniz responds, "Nisi intellectus ipse"... [nothing is in the intellect which was not first in the senses] except the intellect itself!
Such were the limits of the Latin - any language for that matter - of their day. Had their languages and culture been supercharged with the wisdom of proceeding centuries, they might have both been able to agree on something like, "Nothing is in the intellect which was not first in the senses... except the hardwiring of the brain and body itself!" The whole of Latin died out before accumulating a word for "hardwiring". Indeed, even 21st century English does not have one specific word for what is meant here - gross anatomical hardwiring. Can we blame Locke and Leibniz?
Thus we have a powerful demonstration of language as the receptacle of scientific / philosophical / cultural energy.
This is why we must endeavor to live each day bathed in the most advanced language of science and philosophy. We must speak of even the most mundane events in the most accurate language possible - even at the expense of simplicity and utility. We must speak of aircraft buoyed in spacetime by a dance of electromagnetic particles [link]. We must forsake infinity [link]. We must stop calling artificial neural networks "intelligence" [link]. We must teach our children the language of Einstein and not of Newton.
Note that this is no call to be strictly rational in all things. Poetry and art at their best expose the most advanced memes of science and culture.
This is how wisdom lives on, as a well of knowledge for our children to drink from. This is how wisdom never dies.
post-script [i.e. bonus minute of philosophy!]
Ludwig Wittgenstein was a preeminent philosopher of language who was born soon after Charles Darwin died. Wittgenstein's theories of language made no room for evolutionary operations such as that proposed above. In fact, Wittgenstein struggled with Darwin's theories all his life. At a time when evolutionary theory had still not fully sounded through the language / cultural feedback loop, again, can we blame the genius? Perhaps this is an even more profound example than that of Locke and Leibniz, as the philosopher of language was just years too early to appreciate the influence of the naturalist's theories on language itself.