"The goal of all religion is to help you outwit your ego, shoot the sucker between the eyes, get it out of the way," said Lawrence Kushner, an author and Reform rabbi who for 28 years served Congregation Beth El in Sudbury, Mass.
The excitement of the concept has dissipated by the final chapter, in which Marcus offers a list of tips to help us "outwit our inner kluge". No elaborate analogy is necessary to produce recommendations like this one: "Whenever possible, don't make important decisions when you are tired or have other things on your mind". Marcus himself appears to realize that his advice is rather rusty.
Buffed up PE teacher Lee has a cohort of teenagers to help him outwit nerdy science teacher Sarah.
But it could help us outwit our own default assumptions in cases where it matters so much more.
That kind of change won't help anyone outwit the sneaky experimenter who wants to play mind games with you by switching people under your nose.
This may allow bacteria that cause diseases in animals to increase the expression of genes that help them outwit the host's defenses and to resist antibiotic treatments when they enter a warm animal body from a colder environment.
She is also a computer whiz awkwardly spouting reams of techno jargon, spiced with profanities, as she helps Brent outwit the Voice.
With retailers' Internet prices now changing more often — sometimes several times within the space of a day — a new group of tools is helping shoppers outwit the stores.
This end, he finds, is greatly preferable to the shallow certainties of religion, because she is still "doing practical work... educating young doctors / or helping researchers outwit the disease that outwitted her".
In one poem, Afterlife, he salutes her decision to leave her body to science because it means she is still "doing practical work … educating young doctors/ or helping researchers outwit the disease that outwitted her".
Her posthumous fate, suggests Reid (who has no religious faith), seemed preferable to heaven or hell: My wife is in there, somewhere, doing practical work: her organs and tissues are educating young doctors or helping researchers outwit the disease that outwitted her.
