What you are saying is right.
Japan also learnt it from Europeans:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_period
One funny thing I have seen here is very much similar to the quote you have mentioned above. In Western universities, you see students from all nationalities. Really amazing. Probably the hardest working of all these students are East Asians. No one else can compete with them in hard work they put in it. There are South Asians, Iranians and other students who work hard too.
But at the end of the day, it is the Western student himself, while being much more relaxed, and even partying and doing all his fun shitt, who comes and says, listen folks "I have an idea here", "I discovered something last night" or "do you want to see my new invention?". And everyone else is like, not again! Even what little comes out of non-Western students with except to Japanese people, it is almost always achieved under the direction and with help of Western minds.
What you are asking is not clear.
But very roughly by doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations and taking some very simplistic and rudimentary assumptions without going into technicalities, this is what you get:
Human genetic material (excluding mitochondrial DNA) is about 3 billion base pairs.
Humans have about 25 thousand genes (most of the DNA is "junk" which we do not fully understand but it appears to play some role).
Assuming viable human life allows just 0.1% base variation between humans (a conservative estimate), and disregarding all other factors which can play in human genetic variation such as mitochondrial DNA, copy number variation etc, it would mean 3 million bases, here for our rudimentary calculation.
We have four bases so the number of probabilities arising would be 4 ^ 3 million or about 10^1.8million. A very huge number of probabilities.
Just to put this number in context, let me remind you that there are less than 10^80 atoms in the entire observable universe. Even if we take the plank volume (an extremely small volume-a proton is a galaxy compared to a plank volume!), which is the smallest space currently understandable in physics, there is less than 10^184 plank volumes in the observable universe.
The number of possible different humans is over a million order of magnitude greater than any countable thing in universe.
This goes to show every one is unique in its genetic code. And the probability to have been repeated in past or in future is simply unfathomable.