Some Advantages and Disadvantages of Recombination

Theory for the evolutionary properties of recombination is reviewed both in terms of modi er genes and approaches that use group selection Analytical and numerical methods are used to investigate the time to rst appearance of an advantageous two locus chromosome On average whether or not a double mutant chromosome is advantageous it will appear for the rst time faster with recombination than without A comparison is made with recent work on genetic algorithms It is shown using simple examples that whether recombination speeds the production of a favorable multilocus chromosome depends on the shape of the tness function and the initial allele frequencies