Recombination Dramatically Speeds Up Evolution of Finite Populations

Abstract
We study the role of recombination, in the form of bacterial transformation, in speeding up Darwinian evolution. This is done by adding a new process to a previously studied Markov model of evolution on a smooth fitness landscape; this new process allows alleles to be exchanged with those in the surrounding medium. Our results, both numerical and analytic, indicate that, for a wide range of intermediate population sizes, recombination dramatically speeds up the rate of evolutionary advance.
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