  We study the role of recombination, as practiced by genetically-competent
bacteria, 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 evolutionary advance.
