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Even taking the original report and ignoring the refutation, there were never any "identical genes." The argument is over a hypothesized gene transfer to some early ancestral vertebrate to explain similarities above the chance level.

The event has to be old, not a recent cross-jumping of bacterial DNA. That's to allow time for the organism to evolve useful, integrated functions for the new genes. If it were new, the introduced material would almost certainly be out in the "junk" or it would be too harmful to be inherited.

When you get what Hendrix claimed, identical functional genes that defy the tree of life, then you have a scoop.

Me, to Heartlander: If it were new, the introduced material would almost certainly be out in the "junk" or it would be too harmful to be inherited.

The more I look at this, the less I like it. If it goes out there, it's not likely to mutate into a useful gene with START and STOP codons. It has to be workable up front, and it probably isn't, which is one reason we don't see this kind of thing all the time. The other is that bacteria probably don't often get inside eukaryotic cells the way viruses do.