In 1989 Francis Fukuyama famously proclaimed the ‘end of history’. Expressing the unalloyed triumphalism of American liberalism at the end of the Cold War, Fukuyama's controversial declaration also gave voice to postmodernist aspirations to escape from the fixed identities, traditions and institutions of the past and live in a pluralistic present of self-fashioning and unfettered desire. This aspiration seemed to place in jeopardy humanity's historical sense, threatening an unexpected nihilistic outcome to twentieth-century debates about the nature and significance of that sense and its place in the formation and maintenance of social ties and cultural bonds. In an important paper of 1976, the British historian Lawrence Stone examined these debates from the perspective of the professional historian. His tone was both celebratory and cautionary. While looking to the future with diminished expectations and some apprehension, Stone identified the ‘new history’ of the previous forty years as a period of unsurpassed creativity ‘in the whole history of the profession’, brought on by ‘borrowings from the social sciences’. The interaction between the traditional narrative form of history, professionalized between 1870 and 1930, and the neighbouring disciplines of sociology, anthropology, economics, psychology and demography issued in the formation of new fields of historical inquiry, including demographic, cultural and social histories, as well as histories of mass culture, science and the family, which, at the time of Stone's writing, were still in ‘their heroic phase of primary exploration and rapid development’.

Sociologists of scientific knowledge responded to the naturalist call of the Strong Programme with arguments and considerations that straddled the traditional boundaries and ‘levels’ between philosophy and sociology. Their concerns and interests were as much philosophical, and especially epistemological, as they were sociological. By showing how the social dimension of knowledge shaped or determined what count as facts, discoveries, inferences, objectivity and credibility in science, finitism upheld the claim that ‘social factors’ constitute, rather than merely influence, the content and development of scientific knowledge. Squarely opposed to epistemological individualism, which grounded knowledge in individual experience or cognition, finitism maintained that the ‘fundamental and irreducible point’ of ‘the sociological study of scientific knowledge’ is to show ‘in what ways that knowledge has to be understood as a collective good and its application as a collective process’. This chapter traces the development of the discipline of the sociology of scientific knowledge in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, showing how the cultural transition from modernism to postmodernism shaped its evolving conception of the social constitution of science. It also relates these broad philosophical and disciplinary developments to the historiography of science promulgated by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer in Leviathan and the Air-Pump and other essays, which were important points of mediation between sociologists and historians of science.

More than twenty years ago, the late Carleton Perrin likened the current state of our scholarly understanding of the Chemical Revolution to the parable of the blind men and the elephant. While historians of this complex event have a shared sense of being in the presence of a great beast, they mistake the part each of them has touched for the whole thing and hence cannot agree on its nature or identity. As a historical event, the Chemical Revolution is readily identified. It occurred towards the end of the eighteenth century and involved some of the finest scientific minds of Europe in an upheaval of considerable scope and consequence. What is not so easy to determine is the meaning or significance of this event, both for its participants and for subsequent commentators. Nineteenth and early twentieth-century historians of chemistry identified the Chemical Revolution with the conflict between the English natural philosopher Joseph Priestley and the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier over the nature of combustion, with Priestley defending the traditional view that burning substances emit ‘phlogiston’ (the principle of inflammability) against Lavoisier's innovative suggestion that they absorb oxygen. But the issues joined in this debate went well beyond the question of the empirical adequacy of competing scientific explanations, encompassing methodological, epistemological, ontological, linguistic and institutional issues that related to the very identity of chemistry as a scientific discipline.

In accord with the arationality assumption, postpositivist historians of the Chemical Revolution rejected any attempt to locate ‘the causative factors in Lavoisier's work’ in the socioeconomic conditions of eighteenth-century France. According to Carleton Perrin, for example, the Chemical Revolution involved a ‘conceptual breakthrough’ which ‘did not follow inversions of polarity in the changing political climate’. Guerlac linked the Chemical Revolution to the unfolding of an ‘internal history’, claiming that the ‘outstanding feature of Lavoisier's Chemical Revolution’ involved the emergence of chemistry from its ‘industrial and practical background’ as ‘an autonomous discipline, a body of theoretical knowledge’ with ‘its own theoretical problems, its own methods of thought and inner logic’. In a similar vein, Marco Beretta emphasized the problems involved in drawing ‘any univocal conclusion on the relation between science and politics’ in the Chemical Revolution. Treating the ‘social context’ as ‘peripheral’ to the unfolding ‘logic’ of the Chemical Revolution, postpositivist scholars examined specific concepts and theories in relation to particular research programmes, disciplinary research traditions and, in some cases, broader cultural and intellectual themes and movements. The theoreticist orientation of postpositivism also downplayed the role of new observations and experimental evidence in the development of science, leading Freddy Verbruggen to claim that ‘the phlogiston controversy, and the disagreement between, for instance, Priestley and Lavoisier, was not a matter of the ‘observation’, but of the INTERPRETATION of chemical processes’.

Steven Shapin summed up the contrasting implications of postpositivism and postmodernism for the historiography of eighteenth-century science in the following words:

While Shapin and his constructivist allies championed the ‘developing perspective’ at the expense of the ‘older view’, some of his colleagues worried that the emphasis that sociological contextualism gave to the ‘contextuality and contingency involved in scientific research’ problematized the obvious ‘intersubjective character’ of that research, denied the conditions of generalizability necessary to historical explanation, encouraged an unproductive relativism inimical to a normative sociology of scientific knowledge, and pointed towards ‘an extreme, obviously absurd form of positivism and solipsism’. Considering these problems through the lens of eighteenth-century studies, Golinskiclaimed that the ‘essential problem appears to be that of specifying the unity of the Enlightenment in a way which complements the analyses of the separate contexts in which it occurred, without obliterating their individuality’.

An adequate solution to this ‘essential problem’ has important consequences for our understanding of the Chemical Revolution as an integral part of the Enlightenment.

Logical Positivism was a dominant paradigm in twentieth-century philosophy: it shaped ‘virtually every significant result obtained in the philosophy of science between the 1920s and 1950’. Logical Positivism was itself a narrow technical expression of more general philosophical sensibilities associated with the Positivist Movement which first emerged in France at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This movement mingled with the English Whig tradition in political and general history, leading to the idea that the history of science consists in a progressive, teleological struggle between the inexorable agents of cognitive progress and their reactionary opponents. Whig historiographical sensibilities endorsed the positivist view of science as a unitary domain of value-free knowledge, hermetically sealed from metaphysics by the operation of an algorithmic method of inquiry. The mingling of these philosophical and historiographical sensibilities resulted in the hybrid, positivist-Whig historiography of science, which had a long and powerful influence on our understanding of the Chemical Revolution. This chapter relates this influence to variations, within a shared metaphysical framework, on the idea of a unique and defining method of scientific inquiry. It delineates the components of this hybrid historiography – positivism and whiggism – and relates them to deeper and broader philosophical influences associated with the essentialist doctrine of knowledge as inscribed in the nature of things and the historicist notion of an inherent logic of history.

Historians and philosophers of science first voiced their dissatisfaction with the positivist-Whig interpretation of the Chemical Revolution in the 1950s and 60s. In his seminal study Lavoisier – The Crucial Year, published in 1961, Henry Guerlac challenged the prevailing opinion that Antoine Lavoisier was ‘the father of modern chemistry’ because it overlooked ‘the most significant ingredient of the Chemical Revolution’, which concerned Lavoisier's scientific heritage and not his creative genius. Guerlac argued that:

Following Guerlac's lead, subsequent scholars developed ‘thematic analyses of the Chemical Revolution from the perspective of larger developments in eighteenth century science’. New interpretations of the Chemical Revolution appeared when the positivist-Whig interpretative framework gave way to interpretive schemata associated with the rise of postpositivism, which shifted the epistemological centre of gravity of science from individual experimentalists to theoretical traditions.

Postpositivism emerged in the 1960s and 70s as a critical philosophy designed to modify or replace positivism. The dialectic between innovation and tradition was a productive one, which yielded in two or three decades almost as many studies of the Chemical Revolution as appeared in the previous century.

Opposition to postpositivist interpretations of the Chemical Revolution emerged in the 1980s and 1990s among historians of science influenced by the burgeoning discipline of the sociology of scientific knowledge. These historians stressed interpretive rather than evidential inadequacies with postpositivist models of the Chemical Revolution; they faulted these models not so much for errors or inaccuracies in their specific accounts of the Chemical Revolution as for their questionable assumptions concerning the nature of science and its historical development. Treating science as a social activity, social historians replaced the postpositivist focus on what scientists believed and thought with a concern for what they did and why they did it. They focused on concrete processes and specific agents rather than on abstract structures and global paradigms; and they replaced idealist notions of the unity and autonomy of scientific thought and theory with an awareness of the particularity and materiality of experimental and discursive practices. Critical of the essentialist tendencies and normative interests of postpositivism, sociologically minded historians of science developed nominalist descriptions and naturalist accounts of the specific historical and social practices that shaped science and its historical development. Unhappy with the inability of relatively ‘static’ structures, like paradigms and research programmes, to do justice to the specificity and diversity of history, they called for ‘temporalized and contextualized’ accounts of the history of science.

The most immediate impact of postmodernist nominalism and sociological finitism on the historiography of eighteenth-century science and natural philosophy took the form of a pervasive interest in the ‘specificity’ of historical practices and a devaluation of the role of global traditions in the development of science. The globalist view of the cognitive priority of research traditions construed eighteenth-century science and philosophy as a group of coherent bodies of theory and practice, composed of a set of discourses formed and unified by their allegiances to one or other of the cognitive traditions associated with the names of Leibniz, Descartes, Locke, Wolff, Kant and, above all, Newton. But sociologically inclined historians of science dismissed the ‘tradition-seeking method’ as ‘profoundly unhistorical’ and portrayed ‘a great deal of diversity and a low degree of consensus’ in the cognitive features of eighteenth-century science. While a number of scholars drew attention to the variety in Newtonian matter theory, the importance of anti-Newtonian beliefs, and the eclectic nature of eighteenth-century scientific thought in general, Schaffer identified ‘natural philosophy’ as a mode of discursive and experimental practice distinct from science and philosophy. In the same vein, Bensaude-Vincent viewed the Chemical Revolution not as a specific instantiation of the platonic form of a scientific revolution, but as a local event, peculiar to late eighteenth-century France and ‘inappropriately universalized’ by its participants, as well as by subsequent historians and philosophers of science.

INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVES

Reproductive capabilities of mammals, birds and reptiles are influenced by nutrient provision at crucial stages of their life cycles. Nutrition of an individual inevitably depends also on that of its mother, irrespective of whether young are derived from egg-laying (birds, reptiles and prototherian mammals) or other (eutherian and marsupial) species. The maternal contribution is already pre-packaged as vitellus (yolk) at the time of oviposition in egg-laying species, and remains the sole nutrient source until post-hatch feeding commences. In contrast, most mammals rely on real-time maternally-derived nutrients throughout pregnancy and lactation.

Relative to maternal size, total nutrient requirements for production of mammalian offspring up to weaning are highly variable and exhibit enormous interspecies differences in relative distribution between pregnancy and lactation. An example is the kangaroo's trivial investment in pregnancy compared with the guinea pig's significant burden. Even within species, most notably those that produce litters, nutritional and genetic effects on numbers of ova shed and embryos surviving lead to major differences in maternal reproductive effort. It is against this background that we seek to identify feeding strategies which could enhance reproductive performance in endangered species. Central to this goal is greater understanding of specific nutrient roles in stimulating the expression of metabolic pathways that ensure reproductive success. In some cases the response to nutrition is immediate, operating directly upon target organs such as the ovary; in others full expression of nutritional effects is indirect and may not be manifest for months.