because there are no simulations of the agent involved.

The role that would normally be played by simulation is here played by a big evidential study of what people with different genes do. This is why it matters whether the people in the study are good decision-makers or not - only when the people in the study are in a position similar to my own do they fulfill this simulation-like role.

It does not seem to be more evil than Newcomb's problem, but I am not sure, what you mean by "evil". For every decision theory, it is possible, of course, to set up some decision problem, where this decision theory loses. Would you say that I set up the "genetic Newcomb problem" specifically to punish CDT/TDT?

Yeah, that sentence is phrased poorly, sorry. But I'll try to explain. The easy way to construct an evil decision problem (say, targeting TDT) is to figure out what action TDT agents take, and then set the hidden variables so that that action is suboptimal - in this way the problem can be tilted against TDT agents even if the hidden variables don't explicitly care that their settings came from this evil process.

In this problem, the "gene" is like a flag on a certain decision theory that tells what action it will take, and the hidden variables are set such that people with that decision theory (the decision theory that people with the one-box gene use) act suboptimally (people with the one-box gene who two-box get more money). So this uses very similar machinery to an evil decision problem. The saving grace is that the other action also gets its own flag (the two-box gene), which has a different setting of the hidden variables.