contrast is part of the PHYLIP package

Copyright 1991-2004 by the University of Washington. Written by Joseph Felsenstein. Permission is granted to copy this document provided that no fee is charged for it and that this copyright notice is not removed.

This program implements the contrasts calculation described in my 1985 paper on the comparative method (Felsenstein, 1985d). It reads in a data set of the standard quantitative characters sort, and also a tree from the treefile. It then forms the contrasts between species that, according to that tree, are statistically independent. This is done for each character. The contrasts are all standardized by branch lengths (actually, square roots of branch lengths).

References:
Felsenstein, J. 1993. PHYLIP (Phylogeny Inference Package) version 3.5c. Distributed by the author. Department of Genetics, University of Washington, Seattle.

Felsenstein, J. 1989. PHYLIP -- Phylogeny Inference Package (Version 3.2). Cladistics 5: 164-166.