Counterpoints

Evolution in East Germany

Jerold M. Lowenstein

Image: Matt Collins

During the twelve years since The Wall between East and West Germany was torn down, the

former East Germany has had a grueling time trying to catch up with the West politically, architecturally, and scientifically. After a dozen years of Hitler and half a century under Stalin, it hasn’t been easy for easterners to adapt to living and working in a capitalistic democracy. Under communism, professors and researchers had to be members of the Party in order to get ahead. After unification, on the other hand, they have had to be competent and up-to-date or lose their jobs to hustling westerners. The outward manifestation of the years of Soviet hegemony can still be seen in the massive concrete blocks of Socialist Realism architecture that tower over the graceful curves and spires of ancient German cities like Jena, Berlin, and Leipzig.

A monstrous glass cylinder dominates the old university town of Jena, where my wife, anthropologist Adrienne Zihlman, and I attended an international congress on vertebrate morphology. This gleaming shaft, which glares down on the lovely baroque buildings around it, was intended to be the first half of a pair of giant binoculars and home to Zeiss glassworks, Jena’s major industry in the communist era. However, the structure swayed too much in the wind for the fine work of grinding lenses and making other precision equipment, so Zeiss leased the space to the university. People refer to this unloved structure as The Rolling Pin, or Penis Jenensis. Its mirror image was never built. Part of the Zeiss family set up shop in West Germany. After The Wall came down, Zeiss West and Zeiss East merged, and 16,000 of the 24,000 employees in Jena’s outdated plant were fired.

In today’s Germany, tensions between past and present, and between east and west, are always palpable. Easterners feel they aren’t treated as equals by their richer western relatives. Westerners increasingly resent the vast amounts of money poured into rehabilitating the former GDR, particularly since Germany is now experiencing an economic downturn. These feelings run strong in Berlin, for so many years the nexus of the East-West clash, and a city still heavily subsidized by the federal government.

The Reichstag, traditional seat of the German government, epitomizes the coming together of old and new. Atop a fairly standard though refurbished parliamentary structure sits a spectacular glass dome created in 1999 by British architect Norman Foster. One can walk up into this dome via a spiral ramp and look out over the whole city. From one view station, we counted 26 industrial cranes working on major new building developments. We could also see the residual manifestations of Soviet Realism in the boxy, concrete apartment blocks along Karl Marx Allee, as well as the communist East’s feeble architectural response to the creative West—a tall, skinny television tower that Berliners call The Toothpick.

In Berlin, the fall of The Wall has generated the world’s most exciting architectural renaissance. The vast no-man’s-land once occupied by that symbolic barrier is now attracting the attention of the world’s best architects. At the Potsdamer Platz, the fermentation center for the new architecture, we were particularly interested in seeing Renzo Piano’s DaimlerChrysler building, a strong but delicate construction of glass and yellow brick. Piano will be the major architect of the new California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park.

Humboldt University in Berlin was great before World War II. Its faculty boasted 29 Nobel Prize winners, including Max Planck, biochemist Fritz Haber, and bacteriologist Robert Koch. Like most East German universities, it lost much of its respect and influence during the Cold War. With federal funding and reform of its hierarchical academic system, Humboldt is now hitting the comeback trail. My wife and I visited the Humboldt Natural History Museum, where one of her anthropology colleagues was studying primate skeletons. The German explorer Alexander von Humboldt, for whom the museum is named, wrote a Personal Narrative of his 1799-1804 expedition through Brazilian rainforest that inspired in the young Charles Darwin an intense desire to travel and, in Darwin’s own words, “a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of natural science.”

Darwin’s spirit has flamed anew in eastern Germany. Since reunification, the German government has been trying to create “a single research landscape” that will level out the resources and put the neglected east on a par with the prosperous west. The Max Planck Society is a major catalyst in this effort. Continuing a long tradition of establishing research institutes, the Society is now creating new facilities in the eastern part of the country, including the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.

The institute adds to Leipzig’s distinguished reputation as the home of many of Germany’s greatest thinkers. It was the birthplace of the great mathematician Leibnitz; Goethe and Schiller, the fathers of modern German literature, also lived there. At St. Thomas Church, where Bach himself used to perform, you can still hear his cantatas performed on a pipe organ, as they were meant to be heard.

Now housed in a former publishing house, the Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology will move next year to a $30 million facility. The Institute bridges the diverse components of modern anthropology like no other research establishment in the world. Founded in 1997, it investigates the history of humankind with comparative analyses of primates, genes, cultures, cognitive abilities, languages, and social systems of past and present human populations.

A hundred years ago, Max Planck discovered the quantum nature of radiation that led to our current concepts of the physical world. A hundred and forty-two years ago, Charles Darwin published On The Origin of Species and established evolution as the guiding process of biology. It’s appropriate that these two great scientists, the fathers of modern physics and biology, should join in a research institute that bears the name of one and the subject founded by the other. To accomplish its ambitious agenda, the Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology has recruited an international team that includes Swiss primatologist Christophe Boesch, who studies chimpanzees of the Ivory Coast, and Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo, known for his ability to extract and analyze ancient DNA. Most recently, Pääbo demonstrated that Neandertals were a separate species from our own.

It turns out that many a researcher at the Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology is deeply into doodoo. Bodily excreta, so disparaged and disdained in common parlance, are essential ingredients in the research of the institute. Dung is often the most readily available source of information for frustrated mammologists trying to study elusive subjects. While biologists have always depended on droppings to learn about animal diet and health, these days dung is adding an entirely new dimension to the story. Molecular biology techniques such as the polymerase chain reaction now make it possible to retrieve DNA from droppings and identify an animal’s species, paternity, and even the heritage of its parasites. “Waste products” are proving to be a treasure trove of genetic and sociosexual information, just as human garbage is often the matrix for archaeology.

Hendrik Poinar, an institute expert on ancient molecules, relied so much on coprolites (fossil turds) for his doctoral research on ancient DNA that he jokingly refers to the finished product as his “PhD feces.” By extracting DNA from coprolites of extinct giant ground sloths that lived in Gypsum Cave, Nevada, Poinar demonstrated their genetic similarities to other mammals, particularly to armadillos and anteaters.

Brenda Bradley, working on the genetics of Congo gorillas, has become such an expert at interpreting poop that she can distinguish among the fecal outputs of gorilla babies, juvenile females, adult females, young adult male blackbacks, and older male silverbacks. Ullrich Reichard and Karen Chambers check the feces of Thai gibbons for information about their paternity. Gibbons live in monogamous pairs, but these researchers have shown that social monogamy doesn’t necessarily imply sexual exclusivity. DNA from gibbon infants indicates that many babies are fathered by a male other than the mother’s “husband.”

DNA derived from dung has also solved an ongoing argument about our close relative the chimpanzee. A few years ago, some geneticists analyzed DNA from the hair of chimps in the Ivory Coast’s Taï Forest and looked into the paternity situation. They found that many offspring were fathered by males not in the group under study, even though extra-group hanky-panky had never been observed. Skeptical of these results, field primatologists had the study repeated by institute geneticist Linda Vigilant. Using DNA from feces instead of hair, Vigilant got results that were much more precise, and allowed her to compare more stretches of DNA. She proved that, in fact, all the offspring had fathers within the study group.

Karin Eibl, a graduate student at Bayreuth University in Germany, has the more difficult task of collecting urine from captive female bonobos. She’s looking to clarify the relationship between the time of ovulation and the appearance of their prominent sexual swellings, which advertise to males female sexual receptivity. Surprisingly, Karin has found very little correlation. Ovulation can occur any time from two days to two weeks after the swellings begin, not much of a clue to a male about his prospects for fatherhood.

Just a few years ago, most Germans would have been horrified at founding a research institute taking on the sensitive subject of human evolution. The abuses of concentration camp victims in the name of Nazi race research was still fresh in the public mind. Until the end of World War II, what is now the Max Planck Society was known as the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, which actively participated in the atrocities of the Nazi regime. Among past associates was Josef Mengele, “the Angel of Death,” who injected people imprisoned in Auschwitz with chemicals and infectious agents. The “experiments” often resulted in their disfigurement or death. In 1999 Hubert Markl, president of the Max Planck Society, apologized to the victims and expressed regret and shame that such crimes were committed by German scientists.

One afternoon in Leipzig, Adrienne and I set out to see if we could discover the childhood home of a friend who teaches at Santa Cruz. She grew up on the run from the Nazis, sleeping in a different place every night because her mother was one-quarter Jewish. That was enough to make her a target for extermination under the Nazi racial laws. Our friend has never returned or wanted to return to Leipzig. In a neighborhood with streets named for Beethoven, Mozart, and Haydn, we found the address she had given us, but the house had been cleared away long ago. Nearby were large, severe, Soviet-style apartment blocks contrasting with the few elegant middle-class homes spared by the war and its aftermath.

Eastern Germany is slowly recovering from the psychological, economic, and cultural wounds of the war and the communist era. It’s probably an advantage that modern evolutionary biology was not well represented in Germany until recently. The East now has a chance to catch up with and surpass the West, and indeed the whole western world. At the Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, where the enduring spirits of Planck, von Humboldt, and Darwin meet, there is the chance for a fresh start, as on the weed-infested terrain where the Berlin Wall once stood. The Institute will soon have a magnificent new building for its home, but the treasure inside is the international collaboration of primatologists, geneticists, linguists, and psychologists striving to understand what it means on the deepest level to be human.

Jerold M. Lowenstein is professor of medicine at the University of California in San Francisco. jlowen@itsa.ucsf.edu