并不是所有人都同意Crisp的结论

But not all agree that the new evidence is indisputable. “I see little here that is particularly convincing evidence for horizontal gene transfer,” says microbiologist Jonathan Eisen of the University of California, Davis. He doesn’t rule out that horizontal gene transfer between bacteria and animals is possible, but says that there are other explanations for the identified genes being present in only some branches of the evolutionary tree—a gene that existed in a far-off ancestor could have simply been lost in many relatives other than two seemingly unrelated species, for instance. “It is up to [the researchers] to exclude other, more plausible alternatives, and I just do not think they have done that.”