Nice vid from BBC showing cube robots playing a suprisingly good game of "soccer" :
Now if we could attach some basic construction tools and send a few hundred larger models to Mars with a general plan ...
On a larger canvas, we're looking at a blur between "Intelligent Design" and "Natural Selection" here. While robotic 'species' are designed by intelligent entities, they and their successors are also 'selected' based on their performance success. It's a case of where the minds of their makers are a proxy for wild "nature".
Instead of being eaten by lions, laggard designs wind up in the dustbin. Like wild 'nature', what comprises "successful" can vary from creator to creator and from time to time - spawing diverse niche 'species'.
The difference is that none of the 'species' become completely seperate from the others - a creator or creators combine previously-useful ideas proven in different 'species' to create newer, even more capable progeny ... imagine breeding horses with eagles :-)
In the end, this "evolutionary" process will yeild the coveted "general-purpose robot", pretty good at most any task (tasks which may include designing even better robots faster and more accurately than their organic creators ever could ?).