Why bumblebees love cats and other beautiful relationships

> For the next 250 years, despite the best efforts of the English to free themselves from this commercial yoke, the secret of that prodigious dye remained unknown to all but a select fortunate few of Spanish producers. But no production secret can stay that way forever, and so in the closing years of the eighteenth century, British spies succeeded in spiriting away the tightly kept formula: in order to obtain the longed-for carmine, you needed cochineals, and to get cochineals you had to have prickly pears.

History makes this point again and again, spying seems to be the best way every superpower kickstarted many of their efforts.

While it did happen numerous times, it's also going to be repeated far more often than "eventually the British figured it out independently/bought the secret." Superpowers like to boast about their achievements after all.

> There is a famous story along these lines told for the first time by the German biologists Ernst Haeckel and Carl Vogt. As the story goes, the fortunes of England would seem to depend on cats. By nourishing themselves on mice, cats increase the chances of survival of bumblebees, which, in turn, pollinate shamrocks, which then nourish the beef cows that provide the meat to nourish British sailors, thus permitting the British navy—which, as we all know, is the mainstay of the empire—to develop all of its power. T. H. Huxley, expanding on the joke, added that the true force of the empire was not cats but the perseverant love of English spinsters for cats, which kept the cat population so high.

As a point of curiosity, there is a similar observation found in the Buddhist Pali Canon (I think), popularized by Thich Nhat Hanh in his 1987 book "Old Path, White Clouds". It is apparently a very old text, commonly referred to as the "universe in a teacup" in certain circles.

To summarize, one can be said to discern the entire universe in a simple teacup (or bowl) in the same way that one can trace the power of the British Empire to a cat.

> Without water, the potter would not have been able to mix the clay he used to fashion the bowl....Fire was necessary to complete the bowl. Looking deeply, I can see the presence of heat and fire in the bowl...I see the air. Without air, the fire could not have burned and the potter could not have lived. I see the potter and his skillful hands. I see his consciousness. I see the kiln and the wood stacked in the kiln. I see the trees the wood came from. I see the rain, sun, and earth which enabled the trees to grow...I can see thousands of interpenetrating elements which gave rise to this bowl...Contemplating the bowl, it is possible to see the interdependent elements which gave rise to the bowl...these elements are present within and without the bowl. Your own awareness is one of the elements. If you took away heat and returned it to the sun, if you returned the clay to the earth and the water to the river, if you returned the potter to his parents and the wood to the forest trees, could the bowl still exist? [...] Look deeply at this bowl, and you can see the entire universe. This bowl contains the entire universe.

It helps when you see that this article is actually an excerpt from a book, without that knowledge the sentence doesn’t really parse.