We evolved in small groups, and groups thrive best with some amount of specialization. So, it makes sense that there is some evolutionary basis for the archetypes we observe. Some people are just built to be leaders, warriors, nurturers, visionaries, etc.
Some evidence:
- Approximately 1% of people, cross-culturally, are born with sociopathic traits, with consistent patterns of brain behaviour relative to baseline humans: reduced activity in the amygdala and prefrontal cortex, particularly around empathy and moral reasoning; these traits seem to be highly heritable. The consistency across cultures suggests an evolutionary basis. I guess the tribe needs someone who can make the cold, impossible call, when necessary.
- Conversely, high levels of empathy are also heritable. There seem to be nurturer archetypes who hold the social field together more than most. We all know someone unusually gifted in understanding others, reading the energy, soothing tensions and mediating conflicts—if sociopathy is a genetic archetype, then surely this is too.
- Explorer archetype: high dopamine receptor sensitivity (DRD4 gene) is associated with novelty-seeking and nomadic behaviour. The 7r allele in paticular is present at a far higher clip in more nomadic populations like the Bedouins and Amazonian tribes—but every population has some of it, and crucially it varies wildly between individuals. Associated with lower harm avoidance, higher openness, creativity, risk taking etc. ((Chen et al., 1999, Eisenberg et al., 2008 (via chat))
- Shamanism, too: nearly every traditional culture has some variant on the shaman archetype, and this seems to have an evolutionary basis, with shamans seeming to be born with increased temporal lobe sensitivity and theta brainwave activity
- Building and tinkering sub-skills like spatial IQ, working memory, and fine motor skills tend to come as a package deal, and are clearly heritable. Deep cultural archetypes like the smith resonate with deep genetic frequencies: tool-making is one of the oldest human specializations
So, if human types do have an evolutionary basis, we would expect these archetypes to be distributed across the whole human population at about the same levels as would be optimal for an individual tribe (with certain changes in populations which have been civilized for a long time and therefore intensely selecting for certain types such as the warrior, the tool-using grunt; as well as twisting existing types into new forms, such as the storytellers and explorers increasingly becoming scribes, with increased interpretive abilities, close-range vision, focus, propensity for abstraction, etc (all of these should be heritable to some extent))
To whatever extent things in general are heritable, specialization has a natural basis which we should lean in to.