I mean it's bound to be true and actually more extreme than that if you're taking the entire population as your reference. If you take as reference the subset of people who are trying to get to scientific breakthroughs, then yeah, it's dubious.
I’m talking specifically about stuff like the discovery of gravity or electricity, not the very important and significant inventions that aren’t really a step change. The number of people who make these discoveries may even be hundreds or thousands but that is vanishingly small on a planet of billions of people.
Most academic discoveries come from the same kind of hand-me-down process as practical inventions. Newton's tutor was the one who encouraged him toward studying proto-calculus. He even wrote down the fundamental theorem of calculus himself once but not realizing its importance never publicized it.
