The latter two factors are important sources of biological constraints; both acknowledging that both history and constructional principles place limits on what may be achieved in at least the short term of evolution.

Such a view was influential on later workers such as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, such as their famous paper on "spandrels" that criticized panadaptionist accounts of evolution and form.

Seilacher's interest in pattern formation led him to espouse self-organisation models for the origin of certain types of form, the most famous of which are pneu structures.

His most controversial contributions were in his work on the Ediacaran assemblages, which he and Friedrich Pflüger (1994) suggested, based on their constructional morphology, to be pneu structures unrelated to modern metazoans.

He appeared in the film Volcanoes of the Deep Sea, going on a dive on the DSV Alvin to investigate modern analogues of the trace fossil Paleodictyon.