TITLE: Are fundamental groups of aspherical manifolds Hopfian?
QUESTION [25 upvotes]: A group $G$ is Hopfian if every epimorphism $G\to G$ is an isomorphism. A smooth manifold is aspherical if its universal cover is contractible. Are all fundamental groups of aspherical closed smooth manifolds Hopfian?
Perhaps the manifold structure is irrelevant and makes examples harder to construct, so here is another variant that may be more sensible. Let $X$ be a finite CW-complex which is $K(\pi,1)$. If it helps, assume that its top homology is nontrivial. Is $\pi=\pi_1(X)$ Hopfian?
Motivation. Long ago I proved a theorem which is completely useless but sounds very nice: if a manifold $M$ has certain homotopy property, then the Riemannian volume, as a function of a Riemannian metric on $M$, is lower semi-continuous in the Gromov-Hausdorff topology. (And before you laugh at this conclusion, let me mention that it fails for $M=S^3$.)
The required homotopy property is the following: every continuous map $f:M\to M$ which induces an epimorphism of the fundamental group has nonzero (geometric) degree.
This does not sound that nice, and I tried to prove that some known classes of manifolds satisfy it. My best hope was that all essential (as in Gromov's "Filling Riemannian manifolds") manifolds do. I could not neither prove nor disprove this and the best approximation was that having a nonzero-degree map $M\to T^n$ or $M\to RP^n$ is sufficient. I never returned to the problem again but it is still interesting to me.
An affirmative answer to the title question would solve the problem for aspherical manifolds. A negative one would not, and in this case the next question may help (although it is probably stupid because I know nothing about the area):
Question 2. Let $G$ be a finitely presented group and $f:G\to G$ an epimorphism. It it true that $f$ induces epimorphism in (co)homology (over $\mathbb Z$, $\mathbb Q$ or $\mathbb Z/2$)?

REPLY [12 votes]: A couple of remarks on this question: 
It is true for closed aspherical manifolds of dim $\leq 3$, since they have residually finite fundamental group. 
If one could find an aspherical 4-manifold $W$ with boundary, such that $\pi_1 W$ is non-Hopfian,
and a degree >1 map $f:W\to W$ which induces a self-covering $f: \partial W \to \partial W$,
then one might be able to use a reflection trick of Davis to find a closed aspherical
manifold with the same property. Since there exist 3-manifolds which are not co-Hopfian
(in fact, which are finite-sheeted covers of themselves), this approach might work.
I attempted this approach by thickening up the Baumslag-Solitar group presentation complex to a 4-manifold with boundary, but the boundary wasn't co-Hopfian, so I couldn't get the self-mapping of the 2-skeleton to extend.