On a macro scale, human knowledge of the general populace is passed down via conditioning and natural selection as it becomes instinct, but how many generations are required for common knowledge to become instinct? And how much do we learn individually in just one lifetime on the micro scale?

We advance as individual humans from year to year based on what we learn, just as our species has advanced from generation to generation based on what it has learned collectively.

But great knowledge is not necessarily common and doesn’t get passed down via instinct or even necessarily recorded in the most popular books and other forms of media, so mustn’t an individual who is to advance be ravenous to find all that has been recorded in the past that was not passed on evolutionarily by instinct because it was never common but is only passed on in books, some of which only ever had a few thousand copies printed?