The role of social effects in selection for animal improvement

Quantitative genetics can be used to understand how traits will respond to artificial selection regimes, and therefore, it can be an important tool in the development of selective breeding programs for animal improvement. In order to predict the response to selection, the traditional approach in quantitative genetics partitions phenotypic variation into a heritable genetic component that contributes to the response and a non-heritable environmental component that does not. However, there is an increasing recognition that environmental variation contributed by the social environment provided by...