Dr. Donald A. Redelmeier on the Men Who Rule Us: "Akin to Identical White Mice"

This is research scientist Dr. Donald A. Redelmeier, who has statistically proven the link between cell-phone use by drivers and high rates of auto accidents, commenting on hallway photos of members of the medical faculty at the University of Toronto:

The idea came to him one day in a hallway at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine, where he had stopped to admire a century’s worth of class photos showing mostly white men.

“Some people might say, ‘What an old boys’ network,’ ” Dr. Redelmeier said. “But I thought, ‘My goodness, what a homogeneous population, akin to identical white mice, which thereby controls for all sorts of differences.’ ” Thus was born another Redelmeier classic.

The men who rule us--overwhelmingly white (and ostensibly heterosexual), generation upon generation--in all the central governing structures of church and society, seen as identical white mice only imperceptibly different from each other, whose tiny confining world gets projected on the rest of us as our entire world: who'd have thought it?