Attack of the fish babies!

Recently I read a book called Spook by Mary Roach. It covers a wide range of topics about the afterlife from reincarnation to old-school seances and the author's personal journey to see if any of these things are true. Here's a couple of points I thought were interesting:

When does the soul enter the body? This is a really important question in the abortion debate; if a fetus has a soul, it's a lot more difficult to come to terms with killing it. But if it's just little more than a tumor, no biggie. The authour cites a Catholic priest named Norman Ford who says that a fetus doesn't have a soul until about 2 weeks after conception, after the formation of twins is impossible. Kind of makes sense, but does that mean the dude's okay with abortion before 2 weeks? If you accept that theory, do you?

Point two: in ancient times, the soul was seen as a flowing bathouse model, the soul and consciousness flowing like water in the form of spiritus. Later on, Descartes had a similar model but based on then-modern anatomical advances of the day. In the sixties, the mind was seen like a tape recorder, and now, the mind is seen as a computer, that can multi-task and "run out of disk space." In each of these eras, these theories were as true as each theory after it. As the author says, "I've often wondered whether the inventors of these machines created them in their own image of how their minds worked or if they related the machine to the mind after the machines were created".

Thoughts?

P.S.-If anyone's seen an ultrasound of an early fetus, they really look like alien fish babies, and not baby humans. They might have a soul then and might not, but they still look really weird.