Former biochemist here. There may be flaws in the study (i haven't read it), but none of what you're gesturing to strikes me as evidence of "jumping to conclusi

Former biochemist here. There may be flaws in the study (i haven't read it), but none of what you're gesturing to strikes me as evidence of "jumping to conclusions". A couple thousand basepairs is a row (a fair assumed length for encoding proteins) is plenty enough to draw conclusions about evolutionary provenance, and this is totally common. For lots of ho-hum reasons that don't require any spectacular justification, you are full of virus DNA -- it's just mostly never mentioned in popsci articles that come under your skeptical lens :)