For those of you who haven't read Code of the Lifemaker by James P. Hogan, you've missed a very clever prologue where Hogan sets up the premise of the novel, which centers on a society of machines and their first contact with Aliens (Humans.)

The prologue details how a self-replicating factory ship manfunctioned and the machines went through an evolutionary process culminating in genetic variability and recombination, competition, selection, and adaptation.

The prologue is now available on-line.