Gadagkar, R (2002) WIKO - A Veritable Incubator for Competent Radicals. In: Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin Yearbook, 2002 . pp. 79-86.
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Abstract
This was my second year at Wiko. Having been able to spend only five months during the previous year as a Schering Fellow, I was kindly invited as a Guest of the Rector for another five months this year. This year was as exciting as the previous one – my excitement was not numbed by familiarity with Wiko, as many of the neurophysiologists in this year’s class might have predicted. Being in a unique position of having spent two consecutive years at Wiko, it was tempting to make a comparison of the two classes. Indeed I could not help attempting comparisons throughout my stay. But my prediction failed completely. In the ecological literature, we find many examples of taxonomically different but ecologically similar species replacing each other in different habitats. For example, the hornet Vespa tropica is the major predator of the social wasps I study in Bangalore and is responsible for keeping the wasp populations in control. In the New World tropics, similar wasps occur, but not the hornets. Here, ants do the job that hornets do in Bangalore, keeping the social wasps populations in check. Similarly, I had assumed that there would be Fellows this year, morphologically different but with behaviour and other attributes matching those seen last year. For example, I had assumed that in this year’s class I would find a Sanjay Subrahmanyam, a Claude Gilliot, a Patricia Springborg … But I did not find this pattern at all. The class of 2001/02 was an equally interesting but quite a different assemblage of species. Perhaps the number of 40 Fellows is too small to get a full representation of human behavioural types and it may take many years before the patterns keep repeating themselves – long live Wiko!
| Item Type: | Journal Article |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin Yearbook |
| Publisher: | Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin |
| Keywords: | Wissenschaftskolleg |
| Department/Centre: | Division of Biological Sciences > Centre for Ecological Sciences |
| Date Deposited: | 19 Mar 2021 11:02 |
| Last Modified: | 19 Mar 2021 11:02 |
| URI: | http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/68166 |
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