(There is anti-immigrant and nationalist wave all over the world which wants to hinder the historical pattern of immigration and movement of people which helps to create mixed races that have more chances of survival in future hostile environment. It is a fascinating article to read. f.sheikh )
In the future, a lot of people might look like Danielle Shewmake, a 21-year-old college student from Fort Worth, Texas. Shewmake has dark, curly hair, brown eyes, and an olive skin tone that causes many to mistake her heritage as Mediterranean. Her actual pedigree is more complex. Her father is half-Cherokee and half-Caucasian, and her mother, who was born in Jamaica, is the child of an Indian mother and an African and Scottish father.
‘My sister and I are just a combination of all that,’ she says, adding that she dislikes having to pick a particular racial identity. She prefers the term ‘mixed’.
Differences in physical traits between human populations accumulated slowly over tens of thousands of years. As people spread across the globe and adapted to local conditions, a combination of natural selection and cultural innovation led to physical distinctions. But these groups did not remain apart. Contact between groups, whether through trade or conflict, led to the exchange of both genes and ideas. Recent insights from the sequencing of hundreds of thousands of human genomes in the past decade have revealed that our species’ history has been punctuated by many episodes of migration and genetic exchange. The mixing of human groups is nothing new.
What is new is the rate of mixing currently underway. Globalisation means that our species is more mobile than ever before. International migration has reached record highs, as has the number of interracial marriages, leading to a surge of multiracial people such as Shewmake. While genetic differences between human populations do not fall neatly along racial lines, race nevertheless provides insight into the extent of population hybridisation currently underway. This reshuffling of human populations is affecting the very structure of the human gene pool.
Archaeological evidence suggests that Homo sapiens came into existence roughly 200,000 years ago in east Africa. By 50,000 years ago (but possibly earlier) people had begun to spread out of Africa, across the Arabian Peninsula and into Eurasia, perhaps driven by a changing climate that necessitated a search for new food sources. They made their way across now flooded land bridges to reach Australia and the Americas, and eventually came to inhabit even the most remote Pacific islands.
Evidence of these ancient migrations can be found by examining the DNA of living people as well as DNA recovered from ancient skeletons. In some cases, the genome studies corroborate archaeological and historical records of human movements. The Mongol Empire, the Arab slave trade, the spread of Bantu-speaking peoples across much of Africa and the effects of European colonialism have all left a predictable record within our genomes. In other cases, the genetic data provide surprises and can help archaeologists and historians settle controversies. For example, until recently, it was thought that the Americas were settled by a single wave of nomads who travelled across a land bridge spanning the Bering Strait. But recent genome analyses, which include samples from a wide range of indigenous groups, suggest that the Americas might have been colonised by at least four independent waves of settlers.
We are a restless species, and our genomes reveal that even the most intimidating geographical barriers have managed only to somewhat restrict human movements. Today, international migration is increasing at 1 to 2 per cent per year, with 244 million people in 2015 living in a country other than the one in which they were born. The biological implications of this massive experiment in interbreeding we are now witnessing will not be known for generations. But applying what we know about genetics and evolution can help us predict our future, including whether humans will be able to continue adapting to the constantly changing conditions on Earth.
Biological adaptation is a result of natural selection, and natural selection requires diversity. Think of natural selection like a sieve separating one generation from the next. Only the genes from those individuals that are well suited to their environment at that time will reproduce, passing their genes through the sieve to the next generation. Changing conditions alter the shape of the sieve’s holes and thereby which genes can pass through. The more variation there is in the population, the better the chances that some genes present in a generation will be able to pass through the sieve and be inherited by future generations. Unfortunately for us, humans are not very diverse.
We Homo sapiens have less genetic diversity than do many species of chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans – our closest living relatives – despite the fact that each of these are so few in number that they are considered either endangered or critically endangered. Our low diversity is due to the fact that we have only recently become so numerous (whereas the opposite is true for our primate cousins). There are now roughly 7.5 billion living humans, but just 100 years ago there were fewer than 2 billion. Our population has exploded in the recent past, and is continuing to grow, with some 130 million babies born each year. Each baby carries on average 60 new mutations in its genes. With these new gene variants comes the potential for future evolutionary change.
Our ability to continue to adapt to the changing conditions on Earth improves as new genetic variation is introduced to our gene pool through mutations. But the entire human gene pool is made of many smaller gene pools, each corresponding to a particular population. The movement of people around the Earth is mixing these populations, allowing genes to flow back and forth between gene pools, with several important implications for our ongoing evolution.
Let’s start with the downsides. Like all species, human groups became adapted to local environments as we spread around the world. Yet the rapid movement of people between regions and the mixing of people with distinct characteristics means that people today are more likely to live in an environment for which they are not biologically well-suited.
(It will take billion of years to solve some of the deepest mysteries of space by an ordinary computer, but a quantum computer can solve it within a short time. As atom can be both wave and particle and at two positions at the same time, this parallel quality gives quantum computer the ability to run multiple probable scenarios at the same time and come up with the most probable outcome in a short time. No such computer exists yet, and first blue print of such a computer was released recently. Worth reading article. F. Sheikh)
This huge leap forward towards creating a universal quantum computer is published today (1 February 2017) in the influential journal Science Advances (1). It has long been known that such a computer would revolutionise industry, science and commerce on a similar scale as the invention of ordinary computers. But this new work features the actual industrial blueprint to construct such a large-scale machine, more powerful in solving certain problems than any computer ever constructed before.
Once built, the computer’s capabilities mean it would have the potential to answer many questions in science; create new, lifesaving medicines; solve the most mind-boggling scientific problems; unravel the yet unknown mysteries of the furthest reaches of deepest space; and solve some problems that an ordinary computer would take billions of years to compute.
The work features a new invention permitting actual quantum bits to be transmitted between individual quantum computing modules in order to obtain a fully modular large-scale machine capable of reaching nearly arbitrary large computational processing powers.
Previously, scientists had proposed using fibre optic connections to connect individual computer modules. The new invention introduces connections created by electric fields that allow charged atoms (ions) to be transported from one module to another. This new approach allows 100,000 times faster connection speeds between individual quantum computing modules compared to current state-of-the-art fibre link technology.
The new blueprint is the work of an international team of scientists from the University of Sussex (UK), Google (USA), Aarhus University (Denmark), RIKEN (Japan) and Siegen University (Germany).
Prof Winfried Hensinger (2), head of Ion Quantum Technology Group (3) at the University of Sussex, who has been leading this research, said: “For many years, people said that it was completely impossible to construct an actual quantum computer. With our work we have not only shown that it can be done but now we are delivering a nuts and bolts construction plan to build an actual large-scale machine.”
On the 29th of January 1926, Chaudhry Muhammad Hussein and Bibi Hajira Hussien had a baby boy at their two-bedroom abode in Jhang. They named him Abdus Salam; ‘servant of peace’.
“I was born in the country town of Jhang, then part of British India, now Pakistan, in 1926. My father was a teacher and educational official in the Department of Education and my mother was a housewife. I had 6 brothers and 1 sister. My family was by no means rich.
“When I was at school in about 1936 I remember the teacher giving us a lecture on the basic forces in Nature. He began with gravity. Of course we had all heard of gravity. Then he went on to say “Electricity. Now there is a force called electricity, but it doesn’t live in our town Jhang, it lives in the capital town of Lahore, 100 miles to the east”. He had just heard of the nuclear force and he said “that only exists in Europe”. This is to demonstrate what it was like to be taught in a developing country”
Jhang College
Portrait of a young Abdus Salam. Source – ICTP Photo Library
At the age of 12, Abdus Salam was admitted to Jhang’s local college for his intermediate education.
In the following article, published in the Urdu monthly magazine `Tahzeebul Akhlaq’ in January 1986 (translated by Mr. Zakaria Virk), Salam narrates his account of the time he spent at Jhang College.
“I was admitted to Jhang College, Pakistan in 1938 at the tender age of 12. I spent four years there. In those days it was an intermediate college, grade 9, 10, first year and second year classes were taught there. The majority of students in the college were Hindu. It was my good fortune that I had some of the exceptionally learned and most affectionate teachers assigned to me.
The foundation of my academic career was laid in this college. I believe that I owe all of my later accomplishments to this institution and to its hard-working teachers. I firmly believe that a teacher’s affection and his proper attention can make or break a student.”
Right from the start, Salam was deeply invested in his academic growth. At 14, he scored record breaking marks in Punjab university’s matriculation entrance exams.
I remember returning home around 2 p.m. in the afternoon on my bicycle from Maghiana to Jhang city. The news of my standing first in the exam had already reached Jhang city.
I had to pass through Police Gate district of Jhang city to reach my home in Buland Darwaza. I distinctly recall that those Hindu merchants who normally would have closed their shops due to afternoon heat, were standing outside their shops to pay homage to me. Their respect for me and their patronage of education has left an indelible impression on my mind.”
Mathematics at Government College Lahore
In 1942, Salam joined the Government College University at Lahore. He enrolled to study Mathematics A and B, and English. Apart from being somewhat of a prodigy at mathematics, Salam was also seen as a highly able student of the English language by his mentors. It is recorded that some of his tutors thought he would make a great English teacher.
First paper and a scholarship
“A Problem of Ramanujan”: Salam’s first published paper. Source – ICTP Photo Library
In Mathematics, Salam published his first paper in 1943. It was titled, “A problem of Ramanujan”. He graduated next year with jaw-dropping scores: 300 out of 300 marks in Mathematics, 121 out of 150 in English Honours. He stood first at his university, breaking all records in the B.A examination. As a result of Salam’s high scores, he secured a scholarship for further studying mathematics at Cambridge University’s prestigious St John’s College.
“I wrote my first research paper when I was about sixteen years of age which was published in a mathematics journal but I wasn’t actually hooked on research till I went to Cambridge University.
“I was very fortunate to get a scholarship to go to Cambridge. The famous Indian Civil Service examinations had been suspended because of the war and there was a fund of money that had been collected by the Prime Minister of Punjab. This money had been intended for use during the war, but there was some of it left un-used and five scholarships were created for study abroad. It was 1946 and I managed to get a place in one of the boats that were full with British families who were leaving before Indian Independence. If I had not gone that year, I wouldn’t have been able to go to Cambridge; in the following year there was the partition between India and Pakistan and the scholarships simply disappeared.”
Salam at Cambridge
Salam at Cambridge. Source – ICTP Photo Library
I remember my first day at St. John’s College in London, England. When I arrived there my 40 kilogram luggage bag was brought from the railway station by a taxi driver. On arrival at the college I asked a porter for help. He pointed towards a wheel-barrow and told me to help myself. These incidents I am narrating here not for the sake of pastime but the subject at hand is education whereby these anecdotes become part of getting a point across.
While being groomed in a quintessentially British environment at Cambridge University, Salam did not lose sight of his purpose of being there. His grades spoke volumes about his performance.
As K.K Aziz points out in this book, The Coffee House of Lahore, “He got a first both in preliminary in 1947 and Part II in 1948, and then gave up Mathematics for the time being because on the higher level it could not be fully mastered without a good knowledge of physics. In an unprecedented performance, he read Physics for one year and took its Part I and II together in 1949; scoring a first and surprising even his teachers.”
His time at Cambridge ended, for the time being, with a PhD at the Cavendish Laboratory at St Johns’. By the end of his tenure, he had made a mark in the scientific fraternity as a promising young scientist.
‘Intellectual isolation’ in Pakistan
In 1951, after having won a number of awards and accolades, Salam was ready to move back to Pakistan. He dismissed an opportunity to spend a year at Princeton University (where Professor Albert Einstein was too!) and took up the offer to head the mathematics department at GCU. Unfortunately, his time in Lahore was turbulent right from the start. The university allegedly failed to give him an official accommodation. Salam, with his wife, moved in with his colleague Qazi Mohammad, a professor of Philosophy at GC. To resolve the matter, Salam scheduled a meeting with the Minister of Education, Abdul Hameed Dasti. The minister, dismissively said to Salam; “If it suits you, you may continue with your job; if not, you may go.”
Prominent historian Khurshid Aziz in his book, The Coffee House of Lahore, narrates two incidents that exemplify Abdus Salam’s time at GC.
Salam, the football coach
“Professor Sirajuddin, asked him (Abdus Salam) to do something to earn his keep besides his teaching. He was given three choices: to act as Superintendent of the Quadrangle Hostel or to supervise the college accounts or to take charge of the college football team. Salam chose to look after the footballers. Occasionally, at the end of his chore at the University Grounds, he would drop in at the Coffee House and tell me (Khurshid Aziz) about his bitterness on being forced to waste his time. A man who had worked 14 hours a day at Cambridge as a student had now hardly any time to read new literature on his subject, and the facilities in the college laboratory were dust and ashes compared to the Cavendish Laboratories where he had worked as an undergraduate and a doctoral student. It was not difficult to take the gauge of Salam’s frustration.”
Leaves without permission
“A more serious contretemps occurred in the Christmas Holidays of the same years. Professor Wolfgang Pauli, the 1945 Nobel laureate of physics and a friend of Salam, was visiting Bombay on the invitation of Indian science association. He sent a telegram to Salam wishing to see him and asking him if he could come to Bombay. Salam, who had been craving to talk to a peer in his field, at once left for India, and spent a week with Pauli. On his return to Lahore, he was charge sheeted for absenting himself from his station of duty without prior permission. Salam was shocked. He was used to European freedom of movement and had been part of Pakistani bureaucratic set-up for a mere three months. The principal made so much fuss about the incident that Salam feared that he might be dismissed from the education service. At this point S.M. Sharif, the director of Public instruction of the Punjab, intervened and the period of Salam’s absence was treated as leave without pay.”
Riots strike Lahore
A news clipping on the Ahmadiyya riots in 1953. Photo – Dawn archives
In February 1953, anti-Ahmadiyya riots set the city of Lahore ablaze. Incidents of looting, arson attacks spread across not just Lahore but to other parts of Punjab as well. Somewhere between 200 and 2000 Ahmadis were feared to be murdered.
When the dust settled, Abdus Salam had returned to St Johns’ College as a mathematics lecturer.
A fresh start
Salam, back at St Johns College, Cambridge. Source – ICTP Photo Library
I returned to Cambridge in 1954 as a lecturer and Fellow of St. John’s College. Three years later, I accepted a professorship at Imperial College, London, where I succeeded in establishing one of the best theoretical physics groups in the world.
Abdus Salam’s certificate for induction into the PAS. Source – ICTP Photo Library
Despite his move from Pakistan, sections of the Pakistani academia and intelligentsia had begun to value Abdus Salam as an asset. He was inducted in 1954, as a fellow at the Pakistan Academy of Sciences.
Finding home at the UN
Abdus Salam at the United Nations. Source – ICTP Photo Library
In 1955, Abdus Salam had his first brush with the UN as scientific secretary at the first Atoms for Peace conference. He also helped set-up the United Nations Advisory Committee for Science and Technology. The experience was memorable, as he narrated in an interview, years later.
Abdus Salam in conversation with WBGH.
Heading the Theoretical Physics department at Imperial College
Abdus Salam with his colleagues at Imperial College, London. Source – Imperial College
In 1957, Abdus Salam joined Imperial College London, initially, as a lecturer of applied mathematics. By next 1960, he was bestowed with the responsibility of chairing the Theoretical Physics department, along with Paul Matthews.
In both Cambridge and London, Salam had formulated a team of scientists to work with, a majority of whom were Pakistanis. One such scientist was Munir Rashid.
In an interview with Dawn.com, he spoke about the kind of work ethic that characterised Salam.
Scientific secretary for the Government of Pakistan
President Field Marshal Ayub Khan appointed Abdus Salam as his Chief Scientific Officer. With this appointment, Salam endeavoured to improve the standard of scientific progress in Pakistan, using his newly legitimised influence as a leading scientist. During the 60’s Abdus Salam gained influence in Pakistan’s domestic scientific policy and established a number of scientific institutions in Pakistan.
Establishing science in Pakistan
By now, Professor Abdus Salam was juggling a hectic schedule. A lot of his time was spent travelling, mentoring PhD students around the world, delivering lectures and speeches on science and its development. Central to his professional ambitions was the idea of developing science in the third world. Despite the obstacles in his path, Salam devoted his energies towards establishing scientific institution in Pakistan. Together, with I.H Usmani, another Pakistani scientist, Salam set out to lay the foundations of science in Pakistan. He became a member of Pakistan’s Atomic Energy Commission and under the ‘nuclear’ umbrella, did much more than just enhance Pakistan’s nuclear energy capabilities.
Abdus Salam in conversation wit WGBH
Setting up ICTP in Trieste
Abdus Salam inaugurating the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste. Source – ICTP Photo Library
The International Centre for Theoretical Physics was another brainchild of Professor Abdus Salam. Professor Salam believed in potential that scientists from the third-world could offer to the global scientific community. ICTP was set up in Italy’s Trieste after attempts to establish such an institution in Pakistan failed. His colleague Munir Rashid narrates:
Munir Rashid in conversation with Dawn.com
The notion of a Centre that should cater particularly to the needs of physicists from developing countries had lived with me from 1954, when I was forced to leave my own country because I realised that if I stayed there much longer, I would have to leave physics, through sheer intellectual isolation.”
Abdus Salam with his peers at the ICTP library. Photo – ICTP
Munir Rashid in conversation with Dawn.com
Finding peace in a nuclear world
In 1968, Salam received the Atoms for Peace award for his efforts in “making the world aware of the benefits to be gained from using nuclear knowledge for peace, health and prosperity.”
Setting up Pakistan’s first nuclear power plant
Salam greeting Z.A Bhutto. Photo – PAEC
In 1970, Salam helped set up Pakistan’s first nuclear power plant in Karachi with the help of Canadian and Chinese engineers.
A cheque drafted by Abdus Salam for a student. Photo – ICTP
“I am a humble man,” Salam would often say, whenever confronted with a complication. In all his humility, Salam’s generosity was a quality that many of his colleagues and pupils associated him with. He was known to spend out of his own pocket to make it possible for budding scientists in the developing world to realise their potential.
“Funds allotted for science in developing countries are small, and the scientific communities sub-critical. Developing countries must realise that the scientific men and women are a precious asset. They must be given opportunities, responsibilities for the scientific and technological developments in their countries. Quite often, the small numbers that exist are under-utilised. The goal must be to increase their numbers because a world divided between the haves and have-nots of science and technology cannot endure in equilibrium. It is our duty to redress this inequity.”
Anti-Ahmadiyya legislation
Munir Rashid remembers the time when the 1974 anti-Ahmadiyya legislation was passed under Bhutto’s regime. Rashid, who also belongs to the Ahmadiyya sect, talks about how they reacted to the legislation. In what may have been a silent protest, Salam started to grow a beard after 1974. When asked why? His response reflected the emotional scar that had been left on Salam.
Munir Rashid in conversation with Dawn.com
Winning the Noble Prize for Physics
Footage of the ceremony at which Abdus Salam was awarded the Nobel prize
The pinnacle of my physics career came in 1979 when I shared the Nobel Physics Prize with Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg for our unification of electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force in the ‘electroweak’ (a word which I invented in 1978) theory, one of the major achievements of twentieth century physics. This theory had made predictions that could be verified by experiment. The most revealing of these was that a new particle exists at extreme energies. To test this theory we had to convince the experimental physicists working on the great particle accelerators to build new equipment: To create, in principle, conditions that would be similar to those first few moments in the birth of the universe.
Shared by DR.Syed EhtishamPakistan’s parliament passed legislation against “honor killings” after the murder of outspoken social media star Qandeel Baloch.
By Waqar Mustafa
LAHORE, Pakistan, Jan 16 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – A court in Pakistan sentenced a mother to death on Monday for burning her daughter alive as punishment for marrying without the family’s consent.
Parveen Bibi confessed before a special court in the city of Lahore to killing her daughter in June for what she said was “bringing shame to the family.”
Police said 18-year-old Zeenat Rafiq married Hassan Khan and eloped to live with his family a week before she was killed.
The court sentenced Rafiq’s brother Anees to life in prison after the evidence showed her mother and brother had first beaten her, before her mother threw kerosene on her and set her on fire.
After Rafiq’s murder in a poor district of Lahore, none of her relatives sought to claim her body, police said, leaving her husband’s family to bury her charred remains after dark in a graveyard near the city.
Violence against women is rampant in Pakistan, according to the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. Citing media reports, it said there were more than 1,100 “honor killings” in 2015.
Pakistan’s parliament passed legislation against “honor killings” in October, three months after the murder of outspoken social media star Qandeel Baloch. Her brother was arrested in relation to her strangling death in July.
Perceived damage to a family’s “honor” can involve eloping, fraternizing with men or other breaches of conservative values.
In most cases, the victim is a woman and the killer is a relative who escapes punishment by seeking forgiveness for the crime from family members.
Under the new law, relatives can forgive convicts in the case of a death sentence, but they would still have to face a mandatory life sentence.
(Editing by Ros Russell; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, property rights, climate change and resilience. Visit news.trust.org.)
Global Citizen, in partnership with CHIME FOR CHANGE, is campaigning to Level the Law, and fight unjust laws that discriminate against girls and women. Learn more here.
