Fifty years after Richard Dawkins reframed evolution around immortal replicators, the gene-centered perspective continues to illuminate biology while exposing fractures in how selection operates across scales. The New Scientist coverage rightly highlights Dawkins's popularization of William Hamilton's kin selection mathematics, yet it underplays how post-1976 genomics has both validated and complicated the replicator-vehicle distinction. Whole-genome sequencing of thousands of species reveals extensive horizontal gene transfer in microbes and epigenetic modifications that persist across generations, mechanisms absent from the original 1976 framework. These findings echo critiques from Stephen Jay Gould and later multilevel selection theorists, who argued that Dawkins's metaphor sidelines emergent properties at group and organismal levels. Arvid Ågren's recent synthesis of empirical data shows kin selection predictions hold in vertebrates with sample sizes exceeding 200 breeding pairs, but falter in microbial communities where public goods games dominate. The 50th-anniversary edition's epilogue acknowledges cultural evolution extensions without addressing how CRISPR-mediated gene drives now allow direct manipulation of replicator frequencies, a development that tests the selfish gene logic in real time. What the anniversary pieces miss is the philosophical tension: by privileging genes as causal agents, the view risks underestimating stochastic developmental processes documented in evo-devo studies of 50+ model organisms. This lens sharpens ongoing debates, revealing that while the metaphor endures, its explanatory monopoly has eroded under the weight of systems-level data.