Dispatches

Does the soul, the divine, or genius have any physical reality? In chapter one of The Origin of Genius and Fascism, Nevzorov dissects the imagined brains of Jesus and Satan and finds an ordinary primate brain.

Was early man a noble hunter? Nevzorov's answer is anatomical: no. Man has not a single mark of a predator. He was a scavenger, a pack corpse-eater. The hunter is a myth culture painted onto the ape.

What is genius according to Nevzorov? He denies it scientific status entirely: no definition, no criteria. Genius is the word that lets the ordinary borrow prestige and lets humanity dream of overturning Darwin.

Nevzorov's vivarium test: if you could save one animal from slaughter, walk past the human. Not because he is more dangerous than a cobra, but because his defining traits - mendacity, contentiousness, hysteria, thievishness - were survival.

The earliest anatomists did not call the brain's halves hemispheres. Galen and Herophilus called them clunibus: buttocks. Nevzorov argues the first impression of the brain was the truest one.