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All hail the data king. Data scrolls through CNBC newscasts; it controls space travel; it expedites your Amazon.com delivery; and it constitutes the building blocks of life -- DNA. Author Matt Ridley calls DNA "the autobiography of a species" in the subtitle of his book Genome (HarperCollins, 2000). A genome, he argues, tells a story like a novel and acts similar to the source code for a computer. Even to the casual onlooker reading about today's massive genome maps, human DNA begins to look more mundane than mysterious -- a thick and complicated book of operating instructions. So if, as scientists and thinkers suggest, DNA looks and acts like other information, then does it stand to reason that other information evolves like DNA?

According to a new group of thinkers, the answer is yes. Nearly 30 years ago, evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins proposed this theory: The fundamental components of ideas act just like genes, competing for brain space the same way organisms vie for breathing space. He called these basic idea-bits "memes."

Dawkins' reasoning opened a whole new field of thought called memetics. Various scientists and idea merchants picked up the meme idea and ran with it. "Unleash Your Ideavirus" -- the Fast Company cover story by Seth Godin -- applies the meme theory to 21st-century marketing strategies and concludes that infectious branding tidbits like Budweiser's "Wassup" tagline and Pet.com's sock-puppet mascot spread among the populace like voracious viruses. Godin proposes that marketing and memetic savvy, combined with the broadcasting abilities of the Internet, allow business ideas such as Hotmail and Evite to grow at a staggering rate that pre-Internet word of mouth alone could not achieve.

Susan Blackmore, a psychologist and author of The Meme Machine, (Oxford University Press, 1999) has pushed the meme idea about as far as anybody, but she says the basic idea is pretty simple. "All you need is some kind of information that can be copied in various forms with mistakes -- with variations," she says. "Most of the copies die out. The few that get passed on are successful. They go on and get copied and varied again. That's how evolution works."

Simple enough. But it's one thing to say an idea bears a resemblance to a virus, and quite another to say an idea is a kind of virus. A lot of people, scientists included, don't like the implications. Academics quibble over memetic definitions, which remain vague. Others argue point-blank that memetic theory can't be proved. Both groups have a point. The definitions are subject to interpretation, and thinking leaves no fossil record.

Most of us, though, don't like the idea of memes because they exclude free will. In the meme scheme, a human becomes a breathing Xerox machine. Susan Blackmore writes that most of our likes, dislikes, and beliefs are only memes we've picked up along the way. Even the concept of "I" -- the sense of self -- is just a meme, not really ours at all. Blackmore admits to taking an extreme view. "It's more fun," she says. In the hyper-wired world, she imagines memes leaving their human hosts behind and going digital, eventually creating ideas and perhaps a new kind of consciousness beyond our comprehension.