make methods work in lapply - remove lapply's environment

I've defined my own version of summary.default,
that gives a better summary for highly skewed vectors.

If I call
 summary(x)
the method is used.

If I call
 summary(data.frame(x))
the method is not used.

I've traced this to lapply; this uses the new method:
 lapply(list(x), function(x) summary(x))
and this does not:
 lapply(list(x), summary)

If I make a copy of lapply, WITHOUT the environment,
then the method is used.

lapply <- function (X, FUN, ...) {
   FUN <- match.fun(FUN)
   if (!is.vector(X) || is.object(X))
       X <- as.list(X)
   .Internal(lapply(X, FUN))
}

I'm curious to hear reactions to this.
There is a March 2006 thread
   object size vs. file size
in which Duncan Murdoch wrote:

Functions in R consist of 3 parts: the formals, the body, and the
environment. You can't remove any part, but you can change it.

That is exactly what I want to do, remove the environment, so that
when I define a better version of some function that the better
version is used.

Here's a function to automate the process:
copyFunction <- function(Name){
 # Copy a function, without its environment.
 # Name should be quoted
 # Return the copy
 file <- tempfile()
 on.exit(unlink(file))
 dput(get(Name), file = file)
 f <- source(file)$value
 f
}
lapply <- copyFunction("lapply")

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