windex: Analyzing Convergent Evolution Using the Wheatsheaf Index in R

Abstract

Summary windex is a package developed for the R statistical environment to provide novel tools for the analysis of convergent evolution. The recently described Wheatsheaf index provides quantitative measures of the strength of convergence and opens up new possibilities for exploring this evolutionary phenomenon. The windex package allows implementation of this method with additional functions that can be used to create plots and perform statistical tests. R provides compatibility with other packages, and the R environment is familiar to many researchers. Availability The windex package is freely available from CRAN: http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/windex /. Consequently, windex can be installed directly from R and is distributed under the GNU General Public License 2.0.