Interpretation of the word Random

Question

I have previous knowledge of what a random experiment is, but sometimes I get confused by the use of the word Random.

I can express my doubts as the following questions: if something is random them it is aleatory? if something has a defined distribution like in a random experiment then is not true that it is not random? If someone say something is random it is referring to a specific distribution like in a uniform distribution? is not a frequency distribution a pattern?

for example in the following paragraph:

Extinction is a process that can depend on a variety of ecological, geographical, and physiological variables. These variables affect different species of organisms in different ways, and should, therefore, yield a random pattern of extinctions.

It says I should be able to describe extinction with a distribution frequency?

Answer 1

Random means unpredictable. The distribution of the probabilities of the outcomes can be anything, unknown or known.

(If desired, the distribution can be guessed by reasoning from an explanatory model, or determined empirically from an histogram.)

For example, if you throw ten coins at a time, you cannot predict the number of tails. But you known that the distribution will be binomial.