Abstract: Inspired by mechanism and principle of biological immune system，a novel recombination based clonal selection algorithm denoted as RBCSA is proposed.Firstly，a genetic recombination operator is put forward according to the principle of genetic recombination，to enhance the information interaction among individuals in the population，and furthermore，to improve the ability of global search.Then，the hypermutation operator in clonal selection algorithm is modified to strengthen the local search ability of the algorithm.Finally，the genetic recombination operator and modified hypermutaiton are combined together in the new proposed clonal selection algorithm.Sixteen common used benchmark functions in global optimization are employed for testing the proposed algorithm.The simulation results show that RBCSA algorithm has good performance in balancing the ability of exploration and exploitation，and is able to effectively improve the performance of clonal selection algorithm，especially for high dimensional optimization test functions.In addition，RBCSA algorithm is quite competitive in comparing with the state­of­the­art evolutionary algorithms.