There's a reason why people go insane when they study the brain too closely. It's not because the science is overwhelming. It's not because the subject is too complex. It's because nothing about it makes sense. Think about it. How does a lump of biological tissue, designed purely for survival, somehow imagine gods, write symphonies, and launch rockets? How did an animal built for scavenging corpses on the savanna suddenly start pondering the meaning of existence?
And more importantly, why did it take millions of years for that switch to flip? What if intelligence wasn't some grand evolutionary achievement? What if it was just a malfunction? An accidental glitch in the system that should have never happened. Tonight, we're tearing this illusion apart. This is chapter 12 of The Origins of Genius and Fascism by Alexander Nevzorov. A book that doesn't just challenge what we know about intelligence, it questions whether we were ever meant to think in the first place.
And by the end of this episode, you might start wondering the same. And before we begin, connect with the madness. KNOX is a joint project between Trickster Collective and The Mindset Maverick YouTube channel. Find us, follow us. TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, links in the description. And remember, KNOX is everywhere. Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, YouTube. Wherever you get your fix, we're there. Now let's open the skull and see what's inside.
Chapter 12. The Black Comedy of the Hemispheres. The evolution of the human brain is an absurdly comical story. Studying it is a sure-fire way to lose your mind. Of course, the severity of the breakdown depends on how deeply you dive into the subject. A superficial acquaintance might end relatively harmlessly. The doses of chlorpromazine will be mild, and the walls will be soft. But a more serious investigation inevitably leads to worsening psychiatric consequences. The degree of madness may vary, but no one who has closely engaged with this topic has ever managed to keep their sanity intact.
Nobel laureates in physiology and medicine have lost their minds one after another, trapped in the unsolvable paradox of this story. And you can't really blame them. From Sherrington to Eccles, they all knew that any brain function is only possible when supported by the appropriate structure and neuronal mass. But the human brain has neither the structure nor the mass required to sustain rational thought. It has everything else, from formations that regulate blood production, to centers that control facial expressions. But structures responsible for reasoning and thinking? They simply don't exist.
Moreover, the logic of hemispheric evolution outright rejects the possibility of their existence. The evolutionary history of the brain cannot be rewritten. It follows a strict step-by-step sequence. A new brain structure only emerges to serve a new function, and it works exclusively for that function. But the need for reason came far too late. By that time, the processes shaping the brain had long since concluded with no reason to account for such a thing. This is an uncomfortable fact, but there's an old convenient explanation. The idea of reason as an epiphenomenon.
It suggests that all intellectual gymnastics are nothing more than random side effects. With such a massive number of neurons and behavioral functions, rational thought can randomly appear and disappear without rhyme or reason. Reason is nothing more than an amateur theater troupe at a steel mill. It has nothing to do with melting, forging or casting metal, but occasionally, the steelworkers throw off their scorched overalls and perform a jig or a folk dance. Strictly speaking, the physiology of the brain has never offered, does not offer, and cannot offer any other version of reason.
There are simply none. But the cause of psychosis among the brightest minds in neuroscience wasn't just this epiphenomenon. There's an even more disturbing question, one that at first glance seems completely unanswerable. Let's illustrate it with a simple example. Imagine an enormous, incredibly delicate and stunning piece of embroidery. Every stitch is flawless, the pattern's virtuosic. It is undoubtedly a masterpiece. And the proud creator of this exquisite work smirks at us with satisfaction. There is no doubt, he is the one who created it.
But there's a problem. This master embroiderer has no hands and no legs. He has nothing that could hold a needle or guide its microscopic movements. No one cut off his limbs, his deformity is a textbook case of phocomelia, a congenital absence of limbs. But that's not all. This master is also blind, and no, this isn't the result of some tragic accident. This is full-on cryptophthalmia, a prenatal defect that eliminates not just vision, but the very existence of eyes.
Where there should have been eyelids, sclera, eyelashes and pupils, there is nothing. Just smooth skin stretched over his eye sockets, with a few wrinkles where the eyelids should have parted. Clearly, this blind, limbless creature had no chance in hell of creating this breathtaking embroidery. And yet, the masterpiece exists, and it was undoubtedly created by him. The analogy between embroidery and science, technology and civilization is perfectly accurate. Just as the analogy between this deformed artisan and the human brain.
So let's summarize. This thing inside our skulls could not possibly have created something as magnificent as people like to think. And yet, the product exists, and it was created by the brain. The Nobel laureates who had a clear understanding of the brain's capabilities, had every reason to lose their minds and abandon science altogether. And yet, for some reason, the simplest explanation for this paradox never occurred to them, even though it practically screams at you. So, let's go over it briefly, but in order.
Our black comedy began in the Paleogene. After a series of mass extinctions, vacancies suddenly opened up in the animal world. One of them was the junior scavenger position, with promising career growth opportunities. No special skills were required for the role. The only job qualifications were fast reproduction, a powerful gastrointestinal tract. After all, the job required processing large amounts of carrion in various stages of decomposition as quickly as possible. And Homo successfully took that niche.
Of course, not right away. First, Homo had to be raised. That wasn't a problem. When it comes to grotesque experiments, evolution has always outdone even the infamous Unit 731. It has repeatedly created masterpieces of deformity and absurdity. Its graveyard of failures is stacked with the fossilized shells of Hallucigenia, the bones of Stegocephalians, and 900 million other discarded evolutionary blueprints. Yes, 900 million rejected biological drafts. Evolution is a master of freaks and abominations.
You'd think nothing could top the madness of its Devonian-era creations, and yet, in its operation, human experiment, evolution managed to outdo itself. Though, of course, it had no intention of creating Dostoevsky. It simply needed a shameless, aggressive scavenger ape. Not particularly tasty, but still edible, and large enough to serve as a meal for the saber-toothed Dinofelis family and other apex predators of the era. The first act of this comedy began approximately 65 million years ago.
For this latest evolutionary experiment, a rat-tailed critter from the primate order, family Purgatorius was chosen. Naturally, this creature was a descendant of those therapsids that had once given rise to the entire class of mammals. Of course, it inherited from its scaly ancestors their manners and outlook on life. There was no way to refuse this inheritance, but this little beast wasn't particularly vile or exceptional. Simply due to its small size and unimpressive claws, it wasn't much of a threat to anyone.
This thing had a pointy little snout and a proper family name: Purgatorius. It's unlikely that this choice of prototype was deliberate. Most likely poor Purgatorius just got unlucky. One way or another, it became the raw material for the making of Homo, and along the way, a bunch of cute little monkeys got stamped out of it too. To turn Purgatorius into a human, the prototype had to be drastically upscaled, taught to march on its hind legs and stripped of any sense of disgust.
The process began, full of pauses, mistakes, and dead ends as always. But it began. First, Purgatorius had to be stripped of its bald tail. That part was easy. Everything else, though, dragged on for tens of millions of years. The problem is that creating a new zoological genus isn't just a matter of restyling the exterior, it also requires remodeling the brain. Of course, the original model already had something inside its little head, but that something was pathetically primitive.
Of course, it wasn't acorns or buttons, it was a brain. That is to say, the neural slime had long since thickened and compacted into clusters, which then wrapped themselves in radiating fibers and conductive pathways. A substrate was formed, and soon enough, actual brain structures took shape, with fluid-filled cavities wedging themselves in between to nourish the whole thing. But this precious organ weighed no more than 3 grams, and it was completely smooth.
As soon as Purgatorius got promoted, its brain began to swell, and its skull started expanding in width and height. The cheekbones spread apart, the forehead pushed toward the back of the skull, and the circular muscles of the mouth jutted forward. Its cute little face morphed into something broader, flatter, more brutish. But at least the brain started looking fancier. The cortical gyri bulged, and sulci carved themselves into place. The midline fissure between the hemispheres turned out particularly striking, and the striped little cerebellum didn't disappoint either.
What emerged was a thing that looked like an overgrown, swollen morel mushroom, or more precisely, a double-lobed ass. The brainstem, however, remained its most fundamental and ancient part. A truly venerable relic, an antique. First manufactured in the Cambrian era. The brainstem had worked so reliably in ostracoderms and other jawless protofish, that it went straight into mass production and has yet to be discontinued. Evolution, as always, shoves it into the heads of any creature big enough to fit it.
And it's a classic piece of machinery, regulating digestion, blood circulation, the heart, and breathing. It's also self-upgrading, tuning itself up by slapping on accessories like the thalamus and hippocampus whenever needed. The configuration of this add-on kit depends on what kind of organism needs to be moved and multiplied. Inside the brainstem lives the ancient mistress of consciousness, behavior, and sleep: the reticular formation. This formation is the mother of sex and torture, the muse of cunnilingus and terrorism.
The best way to describe the reticular formation's work is through the criminal code, and the best way to see it in action is on PornHub. There was no need to invent anything special for Homo. Purgatorius inherited a well-worn brainstem that had already passed through every circle of the Paleozoic hell. Naturally, this rat-tailed creature had a long ancestral chain stretching back into the Proterozoic. Its portrait gallery of forebears is a veritable exhibition of warty, segmented, and bug-eyed freaks.
They were decked out with leathery crests and webbed appendages, their faces split into grins of a hundred-toothed mouths. Each of these monstrosities left its own unique contribution to the brainstem, enriching it in its own depraved way. This inheritance is irreversible. The brainstem and its structure are nothing more than the neural materialization of an ancestral chain's lived experience. Yes, this experience is horrific and profoundly immoral, but there's nothing to be done about it. Unfortunately, there was never going to be any other kind offered to humanity.
Evolution is a stingy process. It doesn't invent anything. It simply tweaks and refines what's already there. After landing in the human skull, the brainstem didn't shed its criminal tendencies. It simply bulked up a little and armed itself with the necessary toolkit to manage the fickle body of a primate. So there you have it. Homo wasn't built for speed, strength, or strategy. It was slow, pathetic, and barely edible. And yet, it survived. Not because it was special, but because evolution is indifferent.
And now, this is where we pause. If you've been with us before, you know the tradition. Every episode we take a moment to step back. To let the weight of what we've read settle in. And while the words fade, the music steps in. Dark, immersive, a soundtrack to the descent. But before we dive deeper into this chapter, I have to say something. When I first read The Origins of Genius and Fascism, it hit me in a way few books ever have. The raw honesty, the brutal clarity, I knew I couldn't keep it to myself.
That's why I took on the challenge of translating this work into English. To share it with you. To bring Nevzorov's voice into a language that could reach more minds. And right here, right now, you're hearing it for the very first time. But this isn't the whole story. If you've got questions, if you're wondering what it all means, stay tuned. I'm working on a parallel podcast where we'll break down these ideas together. We'll dig into the questions that keep you up at night. And when it launches, you'll be the first to know.
And now, the tradition continues. Every episode, I handpick a track that fits the atmosphere of KNOX. A track that doesn't just fill the silence, it amplifies the descent. So while you're listening, make sure you're connected. Find us on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, all links are in the description. And remember, KNOX is everywhere. Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, YouTube. Wherever you listen, we're there. Now, let this one hit you. Take it in. We'll be back in a few minutes to continue chapter 12.
But for now, enjoy the sound. All right, how was that? I told you, it always fits. That was "I'm Everything," Chemical Surf Extended Remix by EREZ and Julia Nko. Dark, immersive, and perfectly in tune with the atmosphere of KNOX. Chemical Surf is known for their raw, hypnotic sound, and this remix delivers exactly that: a deep bassline, haunting synths, and a pulse that feels like it's pulling you deeper into the night. Released in 2023, it's a track that feels both fresh and timeless. Now, let's get back to it.
You're listening to KNOX, a project by Trickster Collective in collaboration with The Mindset Maverick YouTube channel. I'm Maverick, your host, and this podcast is dedicated to the first ever English reading of The Origins of Genius and Fascism by Alexander Nevzorov. Inspired by this groundbreaking book, I took on the challenge of translating it into American English, making it accessible to a wider audience. If you're just tuning in, don't forget. Follow Trickster Collective on Facebook, Instagram, and SoundCloud, and make sure to follow Mindset Maverick on TikTok and YouTube. All links are in the description.
And of course, you can listen to KNOX on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, wherever you get your fix. Tonight, we're diving into the second half of chapter 12. The Black Comedy of the Hemispheres, where Nevzorov unpacks the brutal, absurd evolution of the human brain and the unexpected glitch that gave rise to reason. Let's pick up where we left off. The brain built for Homo was designed with strict minimalism. No excesses, no infrared vision, no electroreception, no rare extras.
Unfortunately, such elite upgrades are reserved only for evolution's favorites, and humanity clearly never made that list. Moreover, these bonuses must be pre-installed in the genome. They cannot be added later. Well, with one exception. Let's not forget that our creature was given a decent genetic perk, a stone in the paw, which allowed it to register itself among the guild of tool-using animals. Yes, this gift let Homo feel almost on par with the otter and the beaver. But competing with the hornets' craftsmanship was already too much to ask.
And there's a clear reason why things played out this way. Homo was just a run-of-the-mill organism. Short-lived, functional, but hardly exceptional. Let's also not forget humanity's role in the food chain. It would have been strange to waste evolutionary finesse on upgrading a species that primarily served as a walking buffet. At the time, the world was dominated by lazy predators like Dinofelis and Machairodus. They had no interest in chasing aggressive, fast-moving prey. What they needed was slow, easy, and ideally nauseating food.
And in that regard, Homo was simply irreplaceable. So, evolution didn't even break a sweat while assembling a brain for this scavenger, and yet, it still turned out pretty decent. This wrinkled mushroom of a brain provided everything necessary to grab things, snarl, reproduce, shove anything in its mouth that happened to cross its path. And really, that's all that was required for the job. Thinking? That was never part of the plan. There was no such function, and in the Neogene, there was no demand for it either.
In short, out of the 85 billion neurons in the human brain, 72 billion belong to the brainstem and its massive, sprawling add-ons. They control physiology, motor skills, basic reflexes, pain, and sleep. But they don't participate in reasoning or cognition at all. They are above such trivialities. Oh, sure, they manage reactions, orientation, decision-making, memory, reflexes, communication, and aggression. This is the bare minimum for staying alive for any organism, from Metaspriggina to the other icons of the Paleozoic meat grinder.
So, those 72 billion neurons get crossed off the list of anything remotely related to reasoning. No debate necessary. That leaves us with the cerebral cortex and its measly 13 billion neurons. Sure, it's younger than the subcortical layers, but calling it a fresh upgrade would be a stretch. The human brain decided to slap on a cortex long before it had language, reason, or any other so-called intellectual hobbies. Why was the cortex needed? Let's break it down.
The descendant of Purgatorius was turning out to be a clumsy, disease-ridden, utterly ridiculous creature. And yet, the job of a walking meat ration was a highly responsible position. So, in addition to basic survival functions, it needed a truckload of extra features. But the deep brain layers were already packed to the brim. Even something as trivial as a microscopic gland for drooling regulation. There was simply no room left to squeeze it in. And that was just one tiny thing.
This new animal needed to be equipped with about 300 additional skills. For that, it needed extra neural mass. Unfortunately, there's no such thing as a floating stash of spare neurons, just waiting to be assigned to some sudden need or entertainment. Nor do multi-purpose neurons exist. Everything has to be built from scratch, function by function, at a slow, frustrating pace. The process of brain evolution operates on the most ruthless market principle possible. Need a new trick? Fork over some neurons.
Want a complex skill? Pay up with even more neurons. No neurons, no function. Die mad about it. And so, in the second act, the problem of where the hell to put all these new features showed up. The last desperate stretch of brain expansion kicked off. But increasing skull volume was out of the question. It was already pushing the absolute limit of what could squeeze through the birth canal without splitting the mother in half. So, sly-ass evolution pulled a fast one. It textured the surface of the hemispheres.
A slick move by puffing up cortical folds and carving deep-ass grooves between them. The surface area of the cortex tripled. With this setup, those 300 extra physiological and motor demands finally got their neural rationing. Everything barely fit, but the skull didn't explode. And let's be clear, none of these innovations had a damn thing to do with reason. At the time, nobody needed it. The species was already fully stocked with everything it needed to stay alive and keep the meat grinder running.
At last, the scavenger's brain was fully assembled. The specimen was built, tested, and shoved into production. Homo could now grind through mountains of putrid meat. And in all of its spare time, it dedicated itself to unrestricted, mindless fucking. This million-and-a-half-year joyride was probably the happiest goddamn era in all of human history. For all we know, this might have been the real Eden, the primal paradise that religions still get misty-eyed about.
Of course, Homo occasionally found itself in someone else's digestive tract, but that was just the way things worked and nobody saw it as a tragedy, especially since there was always a little something left over from the saber-toothed predator's banquet for the dearly departed's friends and family. At the very least, Homo never thought about a career change. It never chased a promotion. It was perfectly content. It gave a grand total of zero shits about anything. Even if some regions of the brain back then were a bit poorer in neurons than they are today, that still wouldn't explain what happened.
Or rather, what didn't happen. Even in a downgraded version, that brain would have been more than capable of noticing the corrosiveness of acids, the flammability of oil, or the malleability of gold. And once something is noticed, it inevitably gets used. Maybe clumsily at first, but in a way that would inevitably snowball into progress. But that never happened. Not for an absurdly long time. Let me remind you.
The Pliocene-Pleistocene world was a never-ending open-air warehouse of raw materials for every craft and technology imaginable. Right under their feet they had malleable iron meteorites, native gold veins, bismuth, mercury, and aluminosilicates. Cliffs and geological outcrops were stuffed to the brim with coal, belemnites, and giant megalodon teeth. Caves were packed with stalactites, crystals, and metal ores, while volcanic craters overflowed with pooled copper, iron, lead, glass, asphalt, and sulfur.
Gas, oil, acids, and scalding hot water poured from fault lines. Forests provided resins, wax, oils, adhesives, and raw rubber animal carcasses, nerves, tendons, skin, and hair. Any creature even remotely capable of forming a basic cause-and-effect relationship would have latched onto at least one of these resources. And one discovery would have led to another, slowly pulling the creature off its orbit of animalistic perceptions and nudging it toward something just a little more complex. But it never happened.
The next logical step would have been craftsmanship, then the formation of guilds, and within a few thousand years, Homo could have been cruising to the nearest carcass in a Porsche. The properties of materials and liquids were painfully obvious. All it took to exploit them was the ability to form the simplest logical chain. And of course, curiosity, the engine that could have pushed thought forward, linking conclusions together. But for millions of years, the pack scavenger let its vacant stare drift over minerals and metals without a flicker of interest.
It noticed nothing. It grumbled and mumbled, dragging around the stone that its genome had glued to its paw. It didn't give a damn about glass or oil. It shat on exposed veins of gold. And it picked apart rotting flesh on meteorites without sparing a thought for the iron beneath its claws. At first glance, this absurdly prolonged blindness defies explanation. One might even fall for the illusion that this ancient brain had nothing in common with the brain of modern. But that's not the case.
2 million years did nothing to alter the fundamental architecture of the hemispheres. There were some minor increases in size in certain areas, but the principles of neuronal function, connections, reactions, and reflexes in the Pliocene were exactly the same as they are today. The evolutionary history of Homo leaves no doubt. Schrödinger's hemispheres are nothing more than a direct continuation of the pack scavenger's Pliocene brain. Let me repeat. Maybe the cortex of that era didn't match today's in sheer volume, but nobody was asking it to understand wave functions.
We're talking about something as basic as a goddamn shovel. And yet, nothing. The fully developed brain was completely incapable of solving a single logical or intellectual problem. But it never even tried. Not because it was broken or defective, but because that was never its job. Act 3 of this comedy started off pretty idyllically. For a million years, Homo performed its duties flawlessly. But as the Pliocene drew to a close, things took a humiliating turn.
Logic knocked on Homo's slanted forehead. It was not a welcome guest. Reason demanded 5 billion neurons, a glass of cerebrospinal fluid, and a warm corner. Preferably in the most prestigious neighborhood of the brain. Naturally, it was denied accommodation. There were no spare neurons, no extra room in the skull. Everything had already been assigned and there was nowhere left to expand. The skull wasn't elastic. Reason had shown up too late. The resources had already been divvied up.
There was nothing left to claim. And the brain wasn't about to sacrifice vision or kidney function just to develop cause-and-effect reasoning. But reason kept knocking, because the world was going to shit. The climate was collapsing. Another glaciation wiped out both the surplus of corpses and the buffet of edible insects. Without a job to do, Homo began dying off. Primitive invention became its last hope for survival, and reason was the only thing that could make it happen.
With all proper escape routes exhausted, evolution took a desperate gamble. Of course, this was a terrible idea, but at the time, nobody realized that the ability to connect two sticks would eventually lead to Buchenwald. Using the waste products of its own neural factory, evolution hastily patched into the cortex an enhanced ability to recognize connections between things and events. Not much had to be invented. It was enough to simply blow the dust off yet another leftover gene.
End of chapter 12. And here we are. A species that never needed reason, never evolved for logic, never had the neurons for abstract thought, yet somehow convinced itself it was the pinnacle of intelligence. A scavenger ape that spent millions of years mindlessly tearing flesh from bone, and then in an evolutionary blink, built cathedrals, split atoms, coded virtual worlds, and committed every horror imaginable. But stop for a second. What do you think?
Do you feel like an exception to this? Like your mind is something more than a biological glitch? Or does this realization make you uncomfortable? Because here's the real question: not just why intelligence happened, but was it a mistake? If rational thought was never meant to exist, then what the hell are we doing here? This was chapter 12 of The Origins of Genius and Fascism by Alexander Nevzorov. A book that doesn't just challenge human intelligence, it questions whether we should have ever had it at all.
Here in KNOX, we strip the myths away. This is the first time this text has ever been translated into English. But this isn't just a reading. This is an autopsy. And I want to hear your thoughts. Was Nevzorov right? Is all of this just an accident, a malfunction? Drop a comment anywhere. On YouTube, on Instagram, on TikTok, wherever you're listening. Let's see if anyone has an answer because we're not done. The real discussions, the deep breakdowns, those are coming in a parallel podcast, and when it drops, you'll be the first to know.
Until then, subscribe. You can find KNOX on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, wherever you're listening. Follow us on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, links are in the description. Next episode drops in a week. Until then, question everything, doubt relentlessly, and never let the lies of men lull you to sleep. Stay sharp, stay awake, and remember in night we trust.