Have you ever sat down to list every name of every person whose name you remember? Start with every relative you can think of, living or dead, and then name all your friends from grade school. Then name the teachers. And all your bosses and co-workers. Then name all the famous people — for instance, Lincoln, Columbus, Moses, Joseph Smith.

And then name everybody you can think of in your ward.

My guess is that most people hold a thousand people or more in their memories. And listing them all is an excellent way to start writing your personal and family histories. Your memoirs. Your life and times.

Dunbar is talking about the people we groom. The people we are intensely involved with. The people whose approval is important to us. The people we miss if we don't see them often. That's where the Mormon ward really shines.

Never mind how well Dunbar's science holds up. After all, even the coolest scientific hypotheses run up against reality and often get dented or broken.

This fact will remain: Every active Latter-day Saint lives in a small town. A village.

Some people teasingly call this the "McDonald's Church." No matter what ward you go to, the menu is the same.

But the truth is the opposite. The roles are the same, but each ward, each village, has a character all its own.

And what is more disruptive than when somebody comes in and splits off or recombines villages? It can feel almost as painful as being conquered by some barbarian empire and getting dragged off to a new country. Nothing's the same.

There are regional differences, too. In the Mormon Corridor (Utah and some bits of Idaho, Wyoming and Arizona), wards tend to be neighborhoods. Everybody lives in each other's laps.

This is what Dunbar considers to be an essential part of forming those intense 150-member communities. You have to see each other constantly.

Yet where I live, in North Carolina, our wards are spread out over many square miles. You can't just walk out into your front yard and see your village. You have to make a special trip.

The result, though, is not fragmentation, as Dunbar predicted. Often we are more involved in each other's lives because we don't take our community for granted. It isn't just there.

We have to work harder to maintain that village, to re-create it week after week. But we do maintain it.

And the strangest thing of all: Our Mormon way of organizing ourselves just ... happened. There's no mention of "wards" in the Doctrine and Covenants.

They grew to exactly the right size to be the replacement for any and all competing worldly communities. It's part of the glue that holds us together.

We're all members of a worldwide church.

But we experience the church 150 people at a time.

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Orson Scott Card is a writer of nonfiction and fiction, from LDS works to popular fiction. This debuts a weekly column in the Deseret Morning News.