The document discusses assessing the adequacy of phylogenetic trait models by comparing observed trait data to simulated trait data generated under the fitted model. It proposes building a "unit tree" by rescaling branch lengths based on the expected covariance structure implied by the model, so that contrasts on this tree should be independent and normally distributed if the model is adequate. A variety of test statistics can then be computed on the contrasts of the observed data and compared to the distribution of those statistics on simulated contrasts to evaluate the model.