Genius is the question the whole book is built to answer, and the answer starts by dismantling the word. From chapter two, in Nevzorov's own lines.
No definition, no criteria
"For precisely that reason no correct definition of it exists. Nor any strict criteria." The pantheon of geniuses, he says, is "packed with a singing, mugging rabble. From generals to composers."
What genius is for
Its real function is social. Geniuses "raise the general prestige of the genus homo," exactly as "prize-medal poodles raise the standing of their entire breed." The mangiest mutt points to the show poodle and claims kinship -
Thanks to the existence of geniuses, the most hopeless dimwits console themselves that they belong to the smartest creatures around.
Nevzorov // The Origin of Genius and Fascism
And in a line that could be the thesis of NOX itself: "In culture, geniuses play the same role that saints perform in religion."
Why it cannot be left alone
Nevzorov would rather not touch it - "genius would be better left untouched by the cold scalpel" - but he must, because "the presence of 'unknown properties' throws into doubt our whole picture of the origin and development of the human brain." So genius gets traced like anything else: "from the final result you climb down the chain of evolutionary events, all the way to the 'ancestral' little seed." His Boeing 737 descends past ornithopters and leg-flyers to "a bundle of torn hides and sticks on the corpse of the first madman who resolved to flap a pair of wings." Everything has "a calculable ancestral point."
Offspring or guest?
Genius lives in the brain - proof enough: take "an ordinary mixer" to Newton's convolutions and in five minutes he is "an ordinary idiot." But that experiment is "striking but meaningless." It never answers the real question: "was genius the offspring of these convolutions, or a chance guest in them?" To answer, "one should first sort out what the brain actually is." What genius really guards, Nevzorov says, is a wish - "someday to wring the neck of Darwinism and annul the sentence that the theory of evolution has passed on man." Refusing that comfort is the point.