Where'd the Entwives Go? The Answer...

[Willow Oran]

It wasn't Mendel, I think, but another geneticist whose name escapes me, who cut the tails off innumerable generations of mice to prove that acquired traits cannot be inherited.
In other words, JRR to the contrary, there's no way Morgoth could have changed Elves into orcs by torture -- unless he used magic (which would be cheating, and all bets would be off). Neither could Sauron have derived olog-hai from Ents; (or hobbits from Entwives).

Unless by 'torture' he meant awful manipulation of their DNA. Given the semi-divine natures of the perpetrators, I wouldn't discount that.

Something else that should be recalled is that Tolkien only talked about the ents/entwives who dwelt EAST of the Misty Mountains. But it is likely that some of them once lived in Beleriand, and that those came into Eriador after the War of Wrath. There very likely were entwives, and ents, living ever more sleepy and enstranged from their eastern kin in or around the Shire, whose being there had nothing to do with escaping from Sauron. None of the other free races of Middle Earth ever existed as a population confined to a single location, not since the elves first started wandering away from Cuivenien, so why should we assume the ents did?