You pointed out an obvious and irrelevant fact but neglected my main point. This isn't that complicated. If there are two countries with equal technology and education levels, the larger one will have a greater scientific output. All other things being equal, bigger countries should produce more science. And the things that prevent everything from being equal are largely historical aberrations that will decrease with time.

Obviously, there today isn't a direct correlation between population and scientific output. But that's not what I argued. My assertion is that all other things being equal, a larger country will be able to produce more science. This shouldn't be controversial. More people. More resources. More ability to employ scientists to do science.

Yes, there isn't a direct correlation today between population and scientific output, but different countries have radically different levels of development, wealth, and education. But these differences tend to average out over time as the world as a whole becomes more industrialized and developed. For most of human history, China was the leading scientific and technological power. And this was largely because they were simply had the largest population able to invent and discover things. For a time, small European countries had an advantage. But that's just because Europe got lucky and happened to be where the scientific revolution happened to start. That was never a stable position that could be maintained forever. There is no timeline where tiny England continued to control the world forever.

My point is not that, today, there is a direct correlation between scientific output and population size. You pointed out this obvious fact, but you missed the entire point of my comment. My point is that China overtaking the US in scientific output is not unexpected at all. It's exactly what we would expect to happen. It's a returning to the historical norm, the end of an anomalous period of history. A regression to the mean.

Look, I get not being Euro centric, but you're just looking for grievances. Performative wokism taken to the point of farce.

The scientific revolution was a new invention. There was philosophy and rationalism before, but it's incredibly reductive to just collapse the entire scientific method to be no different than the methods of inquiry that came before. It clearly had vastly different and more dramatic real-world consequences than the eras that came before. The Islamic Golden Age did not produce a self-reinforcing series of technological advancements that completely altered the lives of every living human being. The life of a peasant living in an Islamic country was virtually unchanged from before the Islamic Golden Age to after the Islamic Golden Age. I get rejecting imperialism. But you're being so performatively anti-imperialist that it's clouding your judgment.

The scientific method was something that was invented in its modern form in a particular place and time. Yes, it had precursors, but so what? Humans evolved from creatures that are a fundamentally different species to ourselves. Every invention and discovery has precursors, but that doesn't mean they're the same thing. You have such an anti-West axe to grind that you can't recognize a truly remarkable discovery, simply because it happened to be invented by Europeans.

It was not normal for a tiny peninsula on the edge of the Eurasian landmass to, in a few centuries, go from being a global backwater to dominating the world. It's a historical aberration. To explain it, you have two choices;

1. Be a racist and conclude that there is something particularly different about European genetics that makes Europeans either particularly intelligent (positive racism) or particularly evil (negative racism) that allowed them to achieve this feat.

2. Recognize that it was an accident of history and that a uniquely powerful discovery/invention, the modern scientific method, happened to be invented in Europe.

Personally, I don't like Eugenics-based explanations. Maybe you do. But I reject racism, even for the sake of anti-imperialism. Maybe you think Europeans are just genetically evil geniuses. But my default assumption is that everyone is the same, and Europe just happened to roll a natural 20 when it came to where the scientific revolution would happen.

Sure, you can pretend that it was no different from other methods of rational inquiry that came before. But then you have to explain why the modern scientific method produced a knowledge explosion while previous methods didn't.