I translate and read Nevzorov's The Origin of Genius and Fascism for NOX, and no chapter announces the whole project as flatly as the first. So let me lay out its argument in his lines, not mine.
Nevzorov reconstructs the brains of the two figures who, between them, were made "the distributor of unique properties and abilities," and reports the anticlimax: "the most trivial of hemispheres... the most ordinary brainstem and the dullest cerebellum. In other words, this is the brain of homo in its standard configuration." The materialist wager of NOX sits in one of his sentences:
No animal can possess any qualities other than those defined by the structures of its brain or by its genome.
Nevzorov // The Origin of Genius and Fascism
A brain can be read both ways
Tissue can be read forward, from structure to behaviour: "The dimensions of the hemispheres, the nuclei, the amygdalae... will report on the owner." And backward: "Knowing the behavior and the peculiarities of a character, we can easily construct his brain." That the subjects are inventions is no obstacle - "a fantasy can be dissected just as successfully as a real cadaver."
The test of a single, un-fakeable miracle
His test for the supernatural needs only one miracle no skeptic could challenge: knowledge out of its own time. Not Schrodinger's equation. "A gas lighter, for instance. Or a dry-cleaning tag forgotten on the tunic." Neither figure passes. "Neither of them stepped outside the bounds of knowledge of his time." The verdict is quiet and total:
Inside the head of Jesus we have discovered... the brain of the one who invented him.
Nevzorov // The Origin of Genius and Fascism
The real quarry is genius, not God
The gods are a warm-up. The doctrine Nevzorov is actually dissecting is the one that protects genius from biology - that "genius has a supernatural origin" and "cannot be picked at with a scalpel," that "in culture, geniuses play the same role that saints perform in religion." Once "the banality of our pair's convolutions buries any hope for mystery and 'soul' beyond appeal," the last excuse not to explain genius physically is gone.
The soul, he notes, has left no specimen. Among some twelve million relics of twenty-five thousand saints - blood, teeth, hair, hearts - "not a single reliquary contains so much as half a dried convolution of a saint." The one organ that would matter is the one nobody thought worth keeping. That absence is the argument.