Imagine a cookbook that gets rewritten from generation to generation. One day, the borscht recipe receives a secret ingredient from a pastry chef, and from that moment, the taste remembers not only ancestors but also a neighbor. In the Standard Model of evolution, genes behave the same way. Genes are instructions for the organism, a kind of molecular recipe. Some are lost by chance: this is genetic drift, where the frequency of gene variants randomly changes in a population. Others transfer directly between unrelated species: this is horizontal gene transfer, much like chefs swapping recipes. Bacteria, for example, exchange genes for antibiotic resistance, instantly gaining protection. But even our own genome is about 8% viral fragments acquired from primate ancestors: ancient retroviruses inserted their genetic material into the DNA of our forebears, and these "gifts" became fixed in heredity. Researchers built a mathematical model to understand how to distinguish such transfers from random gene losses. By simulating evolution with a constant rate of transfers, they found that telling the two processes apart by analyzing only gene trees is nearly impossible. The footprints, or entropy traces, of both processes are too similar — chaotic losses and acquisitions leave similar statistical patterns in genomes. Thus, the evolutionary tree increasingly resembles a recipe collection full of borrowings, where the boundaries between branches are blurred.